Since 1972, Ken Dunn has run a nonprofit organization called the Resource Center, and for 17 years one branch of the center held the contract for removing manure from the stables used by the Chicago Police Department. Dunn kept the contract for so long not because it paid off particularly well but because it helped bolster another of the Resource Center 19s main activities, making compost. The center uses restaurant kitchen trimmings, waste materials from landscaping companies, and other natural detritus to create organic growing material.

He also started City Farm, which turns empty urban lots, like the ruins of Chicago 19s Cabrini Green projects, into productive urban farms.