About Principal Jessica Grillo

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The path to a truly sustainable world requires that we all play our part and support one-another along the way. This core belief fuels Jessi's dedication to strengthening the social contract between business and society. Her work over the last twenty years has spanned topics including sustainable agriculture, food security, livelihood economics (including living incomes/wages), sustainable tourism, climate resilience, land and forest conservation and disease ecology. She works alongside forward-thinking companies, communities, and civil society organizations to advance sustainability objectives.

Prior to starting a consulting business, Jessi served six years as Rainforest Alliance’s Senior Advisor on livelihoods and social equity, where she played a key role in developing, enhancing and measuring performance of sustainability standards and certification to achieve improved livelihood outcomes, while conserving precious resources for future generations and building resiliency to climate change. While there, she led the charge which made living wages and living incomes top organizational priorities, including representing Rainforest Alliance in a collaboration that launched the Global Living Wage Coalition (GLWC). Her work has helped numerous global companies build socially responsible policies and supply-chain programs. She has served on several leadership, technical, and advisory committees within companies, sector working groups, and multi-stakeholder initiatives.  

Prior to joining Rainforest Alliance, Jessi worked for nearly a decade in livelihood research, food security and humanitarian assistance across more than twenty countries in Africa, Latin America, and South Asia. She spent seven years with the Food Economy Group, four of those as the Livelihoods Advisor for USAID’s Famine Early Warning System Network (FEWS NET). Jessi holds a graduate degree in International Development and Social Change from the International Development, Community and Environment Department (IDCE) at Clark University.  

Jessi currently serves in the Technical Advisory Group for the IDH Living Wage Roadmap; on the Technical Advisory Committee for the Living Income Community of Practice (LICoP); as a Board Member for Vermont Caribbean Institute; and on the South Burlington Natural Resource Management and Conservation Committee. She co-founded an initiative called Living Wage On-Up, to drive payment of living wages in the US, affording a decent quality of life for working families, which has since joined forces to support efforts of a leading social justice organization.

Jessi lives with her family in Vermont, in the United States.