Academy of Community Engagement Scholarship (ACES)

Reneé V. Wallace

Inducted in
2021

FoodPLUS Detroit

Executive Director
Project Portfolio Manager

Photo of Reneé V. Wallace

Biographical Abstracts

Reneé Wallace has the privilege of leading two entrepreneurial entities, Doers Edge (CEO) and FoodPLUS Detroit (Executive Director). She served in efforts that engaged the Detroit public in informing two food system policy changes to-date (Urban Ag ordinance passed in 2013, Urban Livestock ordinance in process), and is currently engaging the public in pilot projects to inform policy change to allow diversion of food waste for composting, with a focus on community-based, community-scale systems.

For her first major engagement as a Michigan State University community partner, she was co-developer of the community track for the inaugural MSU Innovations in Collaborative Modeling conference in 2015, recruiting and engaging 24 Detroit participants. In 2019, with FoodPLUS Detroit, she co-hosted the Participatory Modeling Field School in Detroit, in which leaders of two Detroit community initiatives were engaged in a field trip to explore possibilities for applying scientific research and participatory modeling. Additional members of the public were engaged in a private reception to meet the field school attendees for intimate discussions about modeling, its benefits, and its applications to public and community-level issues. Reneé currently serves as the Process Monitor on the MSU participatory modeling team researching and modeling the Food System in Flint Michigan. Her responsibilities include creating Pathways to Participation (P2P) for the project’s community consultative panel members.

Areas of Expertise

  • Participatory implementation
  • Designing engagement through conversations
  • Public engagement
  • Applying equity lens
  • Participatory qualitative techniques