ATHENS, Ohio — Each year, the nonprofit media organization Grist searches for the most inspiring innovators who are working on fresh solutions to the planet’s biggest problems. The result is a collection of 50 “fixers” building a sustainable world that works for everyone.

Earlier this month, Grist released its “2020 Grist 50”, its fifth annual list of 50 emerging leaders who came up with fresh, real-world solutions to some of the world’s biggest problems. 

“The Grist 50 highlights those working to fix the challenges before us and shows what a vibrant, diverse, solutions-oriented sustainability movement looks like. 

This year’s Grist 50 list features leaders from many different disciplines and backgrounds. It includes farmers, scientists, artists, policymakers, social justice advocates, entrepreneurs, chefs and others. This year, more than 1,000 individuals were nominated to receive the honor. 

Two people chosen among this elite group of 50 are from the Farmworld readership area: Brian Vadakin of Athens, Ohio and Shane Bernardo of Detroit, Michigan. 

After finishing a Fulbright scholarship, Vadakin planned to go to Washington D.C., center of the U.S. policy universe. Instead, Rural Action, a community-development nonprofit focused on Appalachian Ohio, offered him a job. He seized the opportunity and is now growing a new green economy. 

Vadakin, now a Chief Program Officer at Rural Action, aims to help the region leave behind the fossil-fuel industries that once supported it, and move towards a more sustainable, diversified economy.

“The idea is to lift up alternatives to the extractive, boom-and-bust cycles of oil, gas and coal,” Vadakin said.

In his role with Rural Action, Vadakin oversees the group’s three mission-driven initiatives: a produce auction, a waste-management company for festivals, and True Pigments, an organization that creates paint pigments from iron-tainted waters around an abandoned coal mine.

Bernardo said his efforts in Detroit are serving up culture and justice at the same time. Although he cofounded the nonprofit Food as Healing, he prefers the activist label.

“Many indigenous people do the work of sustainability and climate justice without being recognized as ‘celebrity activists,” Bernardo said. “I’ve been involved with these grassroots circles in Detroit for years, using food as a way to better understand social justice and climate change.”

Bernardo cofounded Uprooting Racism Planting Justice to address the fact that white-identified growers in Detroit were getting most of the press, as well as many of the grants, land access and jobs. He also cofounded the Detroit Filipino Supper Club, where people in that group connect through food and culture.