The SPI Team

Frances Moore Lappé is a democracy advocate and world food and hunger expert who has authored or co-authored 16 books. She is the co-founder of three organizations, including Food First: The Institute for Food and Development Policy and, more recently, the Small Planet Institute. In 1987 she received the Right Livelihood Award (a.k.a, the “Alternative Nobel.”) Her first book, Diet for a Small Planet, has sold three million copies and is considered “the blueprint for eating with a small carbon footprint since long before the term was coined” [JM Hirsch, Associated Press].

Her most recent books include Hope’s Edge, written with her daughter Anna Lappé, about democratic social movements worldwide and Getting a Grip: Clarity, Creativity, and Courage in a World Gone Mad, awarded the Nautilus Gold/“Best in Small Press” award. In June 2008, that book and Diet for a Small Planet were designated as must-reads for the next US president (by Barbara Kingsolver and Michael Pollan, respectively) in The New York Times Sunday Review of Books.

Read Frances’s complete bio here.

Anna Blythe Lappé is a national bestselling author and sought-after public speaker, respected for her work on sustainability, food politics, globalization, and social change. Named one of TIME’s “Eco-Who’s Who,” Anna has been featured in The New York Times, Gourmet, O: The Oprah Magazine, Domino, Food & Wine, Body + Soul, Natural Health, and Vibe, among many other publications.

Anna is a founding principal, with her mother Frances Moore Lappé, of the Cambridge-based Small Planet Institute, an international network for research and popular education about the root causes of hunger and poverty. The Lappés are also co-founders of the Small Planet Fund, which has raised more than $500,000 for democratic social movements worldwide, two of which have won the Nobel Peace Prize since the Fund’s founding in 2002.

Read Anna’s complete bio here.

Richard Rowe is a Fellow of the Institute who is contributing his skills and insights to the communications strategy of the Institute. He holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Columbia University and has a background in both academics and business. He is presently the Executive Director of Open Learning Exchange. 

Anthony Lappé is a New York-based writer, television producer and documentary filmmaker. He is the executive editor of GNN.tv, the website for the Guerrilla News Network. He has written for more than twenty publications and web sites, including Details, Fader, New York Magazine, Paper, The New York Times, Vice, Huffington Post, and Salon, among others. In television, he worked as a correspondent for The New York Times Video News International (now NYT-TV), the world pioneer in small-format video-journalism. In 1996, he received two grants from the U.S. government to help train reporters from the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation in the West Bank. In addition, he has been a producer for MTV and Fuse, where he developed and produced the original documentary series, Soundtrack to Your Life. He is the co-author of True Lies (Plume) and the producer of the award-winning Showtime documentary about Iraq BattleGround: 21 Days on the Empire’s Edge (“Historically essential viewing” - Chicago Tribune). Anthony frequently is asked to comment on the media on college campuses, at conferences, and on radio and television programs in the US and the UK, where he is a regular guest on Sky News.

His latest book, the international breakout graphic novel, Shooting War (Grand Central Publishing USA, Weidenfeld & Nicolson UK, Les Arènes France), has been called “the Apocalypse Now of the War on Terrorism” (Forbes), “scary-smart” (Rolling Stone) and “a stunningly rendered graphic novel that manages to stick a red-hot skewer into the war on terror, Islamic jihad, the mainstream media and the antiestablishment blogosphere in one fell swoop” (Newsweek). The book is currently being developed into a television mini-series in the UK.

He is a graduate of NYU and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

He currently is a producer on Brink, a weekly science news show premiering Fall 2008 on the Science Channel.

Wayne Roberts joined the SPI team in the Fall of 2008, and serves as our Manager of Administrative Systems.