Food & Society’s Food Leaders Fellowship, Aspen Institute

Program Overview

Food & Society’s Food Leaders Fellowship will unite the country’s most promising early-stage food system leaders to ignite personal transformation, cross-sector collaboration, and scalable change. Drawing on the Aspen Institute’s history of successful leadership and policy fellowships, the Food Leaders Fellowship will become the foremost community of emerging leaders dedicated to changing our food landscape toward sustainability, food justice, and good health. Combining personal reflection with discussion, learning, mentorship, and action, Food Leaders Fellows will work individually and collectively to realize a better food system.

The Fellowship Experience

Over the course of 18 months, the Food Leaders Fellowship will uniquely combine the lifelong community bonds Aspen fellows form with the pragmatic and tactical expertise of real-world practitioners who will serve as sounding boards and mentors for years to come. Every aspect of the program is built to support, enhance, and scale fellows’ capacity for change. A central tenet of the fellowship experience is the design and implementation of an action plan. Building on the work fellows are already engaged in, action plans will sharpen and enrich fellows’ goals through the reflection, deep understanding, knowledge, mentorship, and peer support they will gain.

Through the Aspen Institute’s time-tested seminar method, fellows will step back from their day-to-day work to critically examine their beliefs and personal mission as they work to identify and hone their ability to make significant change. The first seminar of five days will take place on the Aspen Institute’s Aspen, Colorado, campus. This seminar will provide the personal and professional bonding experience only Aspen—the place and the Institute—offer. Two subsequent four-day seminars will each focus on workshopping the action plans that fellows begin to develop at the first seminar. These seminars will also include experiential field visits to a fellow or fellowship advisor’s organization, production facility, startup, or farm. All seminar and accommodation expenses will be covered by the program.

Between seminars, the Food Leaders Fellowship will draw from its extensive networks to connect Fellows with food industry experts excited to serve as mentors, teachers, and partners, and who will join cohorts for regular virtual gatherings to discuss pressing food industry topics. Mentors will also serve as a main source of support for fellows as they continue to evolve and implement their action plans. These relationships—as well as opportunities to connect and collaborate with the Institute’s global community of values-based leaders across dozens of programs—will create ample opportunities for fellows to refine, adjust, and scale their ideas in real time.

The fellowship opportunity and commitment lasts far beyond the program’s 18-month period—the Food Leaders Fellowship is a community of changemakers leaders join for a lifetime. With each new class, this source of support, learning, deep connection, and collaboration will only grow stronger. Like the best Aspen fellowships, the Food Leaders Fellowship will create lifelong bonds and working relationships that will cultivate meaningful change for decades to come.

Become a Food Leaders Fellow

Fellows will be selected on their own merits and with the purpose of assembling a cohort of distinct and diverse backgrounds, beliefs, and experiences. Specifically, the program seeks:

Candidates who are changemakers, entrepreneurs, emerging leaders, and innovators in the food system

Candidates who are focused on creating and strengthening resilient, equitable, sustainable, and healthy food systems and bringing solutions to scale

Candidates who have some experience addressing food system issues in an innovative way or through strong efforts around a particular issue, including but not limited to:

Increasing the resilience of agriculture and the supply chain to address climate change

Changing organizational practices to center marginalized communities in the design and implementation of marketing strategies, product design, and staff structure

Changing procurement policies to reflect local, global, and corporate sustainability goals

Incentivizing the consumption of plant-based foods and sustainably produced protein

Incentivizing food innovation and entrepreneurship that will lower barriers to equitable production and distribution

Reducing food waste at all levels—field, processor, distributor, retailer, restaurant, and consumer

Reducing the burden of chronic disease caused by nutritional imbalances

Candidates who are interested in collaborating across the food system to deepen impact and address systemic challenges

Candidates who value continued growth, diverse perspectives, lived experience, and innovation in service of those affected by challenges in the food system

Candidates who want to become part of a lifelong community of changemakers

Applications are open now until April 15, 2022, at 11:59 p.m. Eastern time zone. Fellowship staff will conduct virtual interviews with promising candidates in April and May, and all candidates will be notified of their status by the end of May. The public announcement of the cohort will be in early June, and the cohort will launch with its first seminar in August.

Please note that the program requires candidates to commit to full participation, including attending all seminars from start to finish, to be considered for the fellowship. The dates for this class’s seminars are:

August 22-26, 2022

April 27-30, 2023

February 1-4, 2024

To Apply: 

https://www.aspeninstitute.org/programs/food-and-society-program/food-leaders-fellowship/