Bios

Jessi helps others navigate the complicated sustainability landscape, through direct advising, multi-stakeholder facilitation, and co-design of practical and innovative solutions. Whether developing due diligence frameworks, advising businesses on achieviing ESG and SDG targets, or helping address emergent issues in human rights, supply chain value distribution or ecosystem services markets, her purpose is to find the best-fit solutions for long-term impact. She believes that “intersectionality” is the key to a sustainable future. Human rights and ecosystem health go hand-in-hand, as do regenerative business practices and long-term prosperity.

In 2019, Jessi created Heartwood LLC, where she serves as a trusted thought partner, technical consultant and facilitator to donors, NGOs, sustainability platforms and global companies. In recent years, Jessi has played an important role in advancing the work on global living wages and living incomes, while shedding light on the structures and systems that serve to either block or enable progress. With an emphasis on the common roots of environmental and social change, she has also helped clients evaluate procurement practices to advance simultaneous uptake of climate smart agriculture and living wages, strengthen multi-stakeholder collaborations; improve due diligence and risk management; build systems-based standards; and create transparency around claims.

For more detail, check out Heartwood’s project portfolio 

Prior to starting Heartwood, Jessi worked for the sustainable agriculture NGO and voluntary standard system (VSS), Rainforest Alliance, on corporate and landscape programs. She led the organization's human rights, livelihood economics, and environmental justice strategy, integrating policies and best practices into research and implementation.

Jessi began her professional career analyzing the impact of weather, climate and economic shocks on agricultural communities around the world. As the Director of the livelihoods unit for the Famine Early Warning Systems, she was responsible for a livelihoods-based analytical framework that provided early warning of food insecurity across 26 countries and was part of a team of experts tasked to synthesize and translate that information in support of strategic and policy decisions for USAID, multi-lateral donors and national governments. Her early consulting work included projects with USAID on market-based solutions to reduce vulnerability among farmers, and with the American Red Cross to develop planning guidance for their international disaster response teams. 

Jessi currently sits on the Board of Directors for Living Wage for US, the first living wage certification in the U.S, for which she was also an early co-developer. She is on the Technical Advisory Committees for the Living Income Community of Practice and the IDH Roadmap on Living Wages Technical Advisory Group. She formerly served 3 years on the Board of Directors for the Caribbean Agroecology Institute. Jessi holds a Master’s Degree in International Development and Social Change from Clark University. She and her family currently live and play in Bend, Oregon.