Meet some of my recent projects near and dear to my heart.
Co-Founder of Food + Planet: empowering 1 million health professionals by 2025.
There is a global movement that has awakened to the power of Nature that lies at the base of public health. We launched the non-profit Food + Planet with a simple idea: supercharged sustainability education for health professionals, combined with real-world tools that drive action and inclusivity. Ecological health is as essential to human flourishing as our health professional credentials-especially in our most vulnerable communities.
Expanding organic access to ALL eaters.
As a mother, one of my core truths is that healthy food is a right for all children. So when I learned that over 50% of babies born in the U.S. today qualify for government assistance, it was an immediate yes to collaborate with the Earth’s Best team to become the nation’s first organic baby food available on WIC. Today, Earth’s Best has dramatically expanded availability of organics for all families, reaching 47% of all WIC eligible eaters across 11 states. Just as importantly, the move helped launch a national conversation around access and everyday affordability.
Advising capital to scale food-climate solutions.
How do we align capital to advance deep regeneration of people and planet? In 2019 I was honored to join the Advisory Board of the Drawdown Fund: inspired by the 2017 global bestseller Project Drawdown, Drawdown is a $250m investment fund focused on the most catalytic solutions to solve the climate crisis by focusing on the highest impact investable opportunities across energy, food and agriculture, and the empowerment of women and girls.
Building new narratives that empower eaters and grow brands.
When partners work with me, they gain access to my network. For sustainable seafood startup Scout Craft Cannery, these relationships were a game changer, leading to securing a funding partner (Almanac), distribution in Whole Foods, and invitations to pitch investor conferences on both costs. My heart (and tastebuds) couldn’t be happier! Seafood has proven a stubborn category for change. Together, we refined Scout’s story and built a fresh narrative that linked culinary innovation with gold-standard sustainability, an approach that hooked millennials and retailers for maximum social impact.
Bringing consumers along on the sustainability revolution: Clean Eating Magazine Colab.
Imagine getting the chance to share ideas and how to’s from the frontlines of the sustainability revolution with 8 million readers. That’s what happened when I dreamed up “A Greener You” column with Clean Eating Magazine in 2015. I am proud we’ve covered urgent issues from pollinator health to upcycled foods, regenerative ocean farming to the soil-microbiome connection and the potential of soil to fight climate change, long before these topics made most Trend Reports. We brought these ideas to life in a deeper way in the 45 Day Health & Happiness Transformation Challenge. My goal is simple: to make sure what matters most means the most.
Harnessing the power of regenerative agriculture for health.
As a senior advisor to the Sun Valley Institute, I helped guide their Food and Agriculture team building initiatives such a Regen Idaho Investment Fund (with RePlant Capital) and a Rural Regen Fund (with the American Farmland Trust). Our 2030 Idaho Food Vision was a semi-finalist for the Rockefeller Food System Vision Prize, and ultimately became a roadmap for catalyzing micro investments to support innovative rural Idaho producers.
Creating a modern metric for “Protein Quality.”
In everyday language, “quality” is linked to being better and more desirable. Yet due to a government framework that’s over 100 years old, the rules guiding how food labels are permitted to talk about “protein” is often actually at odds with our most urgent public health challenges.
In 2019 I collaborated with the True Health Initiative and several leading nutrition and medical minds (including Dr. David Katz from Yale, Dr. Christopher Gardner from Stanford, and Dr. David Jenkins from University of Toronto) to lay out the public health case for a federally updated definition of “protein quality”. We published a groundbreaking paper that gained widespread media attention, and launched a petition to the FDA.
