Jessica Grillo, Founder & Principal Consultant

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I started my career watching ecosystems and livelihoods collapse together. With the Food Economy Group, and as Director of Livelihoods for the USAID Famine Early Warning System (FEWS NET), I spent five years working in regions where the line between environmental destruction and human suffering was impossible to ignore. That experience solidified a conviction that has shaped everything since: that you cannot solve ecological problems without the communities that depend on those ecosystems, and vice versa.

The last 20+ years have taken me across 30 countries and into very different kinds of work — but the same thread runs through it all. At Rainforest Alliance, it meant asking whether farmers and forest communities benefitted alongside the lands they stewarded. Building the IDH Salary Matrix meant ensuring that fair wages were part of what sustainability requires, not an afterthought. Co-designing the Equitable Earth standard meant insisting that conservation finance flow to — and be directed by — the Indigenous and local communities protecting our forests and biodiversity.

I founded Heartwood to do this work on my own terms — with the relationships, depth of engagement, and quality of thinking that complexity demands.

I live in Bend, Oregon, in the heart of wildfire country, in a landscape that is changing fast. I have always been drawn to places where ecosystems and human lives are visibly entangled — a pull I've felt since first studying lemurs and ecotourism in Madagascar as an undergraduate and have never lost. The North American West is where that sensibility and two decades of global experience now converge.

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M.A., International Development, Clark University, Department of Sustainability and Social Justice | Board of Directors, Living Wage For US | NFPA Wildfire Mitigation Specialist Certification (in progress)