ANNA BLYTHE LAPPÉ
Named one of TIME’s “eco” Who’s-Who, Anna is the founder or co-founder of three national organizations
Anna Lappé is a national bestselling author, a respected advocate for sustainability and justice along the food chain and an advisor to funders investing in food system transformation. A recipient of the James Beard Leadership Award, Anna is the co-author or author of three books and the contributing author to more than a dozen others. Anna’s work has been translated internationally and featured in The Washington Post, The New York Times, Gourmet, Oprah Magazine, among many other outlets.
Named one of TIME’s “eco” Who’s-Who, Anna is the founder or co-founder of three national organizations, including the Small Planet Institute and the Small Planet Fund, which she launched with her mother, Frances Moore Lappé. She currently leads Real Food Media, based at Corporate Accountability International, which she founded to bring together leading food and farm organizations to produce powerful communications initiatives to inspire, educate and grow the movement for sustainable food and farming. Since its founding in 2012, Real Food Media has created the world’s largest short films competition on food with pop-up festivals around the world, collaborated with the award-winning StoryCorps to elevate voices of food workers, produced powerful mythbusting videos viewed more than one million times, launched a national online book club #RealFoodReads, and helped support passage of good food purchasing policies nationwide. In addition to her philanthropy through the Small Planet Fund, Anna is the director of the Food & Democracy program of the Panta Rhea Foundation and is an active participant of several funder collaboratives building more just and sustainable food systems worldwide.
PROMINENT RECOGNITION
Anna’s writing and advocacy have earned her numerous accolades. In addition to her being named one of TIME's "eco" Who's-Who, Anna has received the James Beard Foundation Leadership Award, been featured as a food fighter in The New York Times, and received the Compassion in Action Award from the Missing Peace Project.
SMALL PLANET
In 2001, with her mother Frances Moore Lappé, Anna co-founded 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 and given away more than $1 million for democratic social movements worldwide, two of which have won the Nobel Peace Prize since the Fund’s founding in 2002.
Anna holds an M.A. in Economic and Political Development from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and graduated with honors from Brown University. From 2004 to 2006, she was a Food and Society Policy Fellow, a national program of the WK Kellogg Foundation. She is an active board member of Rainforest Action Network and the Mesa Refuge, a writer’s retreat in Point Reyes, California.
Based in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and two daughters, Anna has conducted research on food and sustainability across the United States and in more than 20 countries worldwide, including South Korea, China, Bangladesh, India, France, Poland, Italy, Mali, Kenya, Brazil and Turkey.