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Late-life problem-solver wins national award for innovative N.C. mountains-to-market network

Timothy Will

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SAN FRANCISCO — Timothy Will, who settled in Rutherfordton, N.C., and created a successful virtual and physical connection between local farmers and Charlotte chefs, has been named one of the 2009 winners of a $100,000 Purpose Prize, awards that aim to highlight how people over 60 work on social problems.

The award, presented in San Francisco, is one of five given by a nonprofit organization called Civic Ventures through its Encore Campaign that honors people engaged in socially conscious second careers.

Will, who had a background in telecommunications, moved to the mountains from Miami in 2006. He'd seen the region while watching "The Last of the Mohicans" movie and found out where it had been filmed. He had been in the Peace Corps and later was a neighborhood planner in New Orleans. Much of his telecom career involved introducing complex technological innovations in the Caribbean and South America.

Will took a job as a small-business developer with the Foothills Connect Business & Technology Center in Rutherfordton, in Rutherford County. The center was created to support small business entrepreneurs and provide community Internet access, but to that point it had done little more than set up a handful of computer terminals for public use. Less than a month later, the director resigned. With no other candidates on the horizon, Will was promoted to the top post almost by default.

Rutherford County had lost 75 percent of its textile and furniture manufacturing jobs to globalization. And the county found itself on the wrong side of the nation's digital divide, with little broadband infrastructure on which to build a new economy, Civic Ventures said in describing Will's work.

"I moved from a totally connected world to a mostly disconnected world," Will told the organization. "People didn't realize how far down in the hole they were. Without broadband, they were never going to get out of it."

Will got his center a $1.4 million grant from the state's Golden LEAF to wire the county's schools and police and fire departments. He also rounded up local farmers and, after talking to a chef from a Charlotte restaurant, realized there was a farm-to-restaurant opportunity waiting. The result was the Farmers Fresh Market and online ordering.

Civic Ventures describes itself as a national think tank on "boomers, work and social purpose." Funding for the prizes comes from The Atlantic Philanthropies and the John Templeton Foundation.

Sherry Lansing, CEO of the Sherry Lansing Foundation and former chair of Paramount Pictures' Motion Picture Group, chairs the jury that selected this year's winners. The 24 judges are leaders in business, politics, journalism and the nonprofit sector, including actor Sidney Poitier, social entrepreneur Thomas Tierney, former Senator Harris Wofford and journalist Cokie Roberts.

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