Bios
Jessica Grillo, Founder and Principal Consultant
Jessi has over 20 years of experience helping investors, businesses and communities co-create scalable solutions that effectively manage risk while unlocking opportunities for long-term sustainability. She believes that meaningful conservation and development calls for deep listening, transparency, and social equity. It starts by seeing the interconnections between people and place.
Jessi began her career in international disaster risk and resiliency. She served 4 years as Director of Livelihoods for the USAID Famine Early Warning System (FEWS NET), where she regularly witnessed the devastation caused by economic vulnerability and ecosystem destruction. In 2012, she joined Rainforest Alliance and has since worked with companies, standards bodies, and global trade and development platforms to advance sustainable land use, production systems and value chains. In 2019, Jessi created Heartwood LLC to focus on Nature-based Solutions (NbS) that invest in communities to improve ecological outcomes and climate resiliency, and identify opportunity within ecosystem services markets.
Jessi has helped build several leading standards, frameworks and platforms, including the IDH Salary Matrix, a leading global living wage tool. From 2023-2024, she helped design Equitable Earth (EqE), a standard and radical transparency platform that raises the bar for the voluntary carbon market, focused on ending deforestation and biodiversity loss by bringing climate finance directly to Indigenous Peoples and local communities. Her clients come from the voluntary carbon market; the agricultural sector; government agencies; federal enterprises; and coalitions in sustainable food and manufacturing.
Jessi holds a Master’s Degree in International Development from the Department of Sustainability and Social Justice at Clark University. She is on the Board of Directors for Living Wage for US. Jessi and her family live, play and appreciate nature in Bend, Oregon.
Jessica Grillo
William Crosse, Associate Consultant
Will has over 20 years of experience designing and implementing inclusive conservation initiatives across Africa, Asia-Pacific, and Latin America. With experience working at the intersection of sustainable land use management and value chain development, Will is passionate about building collective action among communities, governments, NGOs, and the private sector to create aligned business cases and shared value for conservation in threatened forest landscapes. He is a firm believer that conservation and restoration must
centre on the customary traditions, rights and needs of communities to create equitable and durable incentives that address the root causes of biodiversity loss.
Between 2005 and 2022, Will worked for the Rainforest Alliance and Conservation International designing science-based frameworks and tools for monitoring, evaluating and adaptively managing nature-based solutions that support economic prosperity for rural communities while delivering durable conservation outcomes. More recently, he was Vice-President of Impacts at Everland overseeing a team responsible for project due diligence and impact evaluation and reporting. During this tenure, he also helped design Equitable Earth, a pioneering voluntary carbon market standard and platform focused on ending deforestation and biodiversity loss by driving climate finance directly to Indigenous Peoples and local communities via community-led forest conservation projects.
Will holds an MSc. in Oceanography from the University of Southampton, UK. He is currently based in Nairobi where he enjoys exploring the natural and cultural wonders of East Africa with his family.
Anna Buxaderas, Associate Consultant
Anna is always on a quest for the ingredients of a creative, happy and sustainable life and the recipe for a fair and just world where all living creatures can exist, thrive and flourish. Willing to re-connect with nature after twenty years of corporate work and big city living, she moved with her partner to a small rural community, between the Pyrenees and the Mediterranean sea, where she now balances her consulting work with tending a vegetable orchard and some art practice. She loves the taste of freshly picked ripen tomatoes, the sound of bells and knowing her neighbours.
During her work at different positions for multinational corporations from various sectors, Anna was responsible to develop, implement, audit and certify integrated quality, environment and health and safety management systems in Europe, South Asia, and Latin America, gaining expertise on project and team management as well as awareness on the difficulties and challenges of driving change and promoting the sustainability agenda within complex organisations.
After her MBA, she established herself as an independent consultant and, for the last 10 years, she has helped scheme owners, companies and producer organisations to improve the requirements and audit process methodologies of sustainability schemes and company codes of conduct by providing benchmark, research, gap analysis and expert advice.
Anna also works in collaboration with other small consultancy firms, where she supports the development and implementation of sustainability strategies and provides training on sustainability topics such as certifications and living wages.
Anna is happy to be an associate consultant at Heartwood, where she has worked with Jessi on the IDH Roadmap on Living Wages and other related activities.
