Climate Finance & Environmental Justice
Climate Finance & Indigenous Rights
Jessi is proud to have been an in-house consultant, as part of the seed team for Equitable Earth - co-facilitating stakeholder participation and co-designing the Standard and Quality & Impacts Framework to help bring transparency and climate finance directly to Indigenous Peoples and local community land stewards.
Carbon Market Due Diligence
Heartwood worked with Everland—a company which strives to help people prosper from conserving their forests and wildlife through the sale of Verified Emission Reductions (VRRs) credits—to create a due diligence (DD) framework linked to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and conduct on-site due diligence.
Free Prior and Informed Consent & Impact Assessment
Heartwood worked with ISEAL Alliance staff to develop a primer on Free Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) that goes beyond mere consent, and produced.
Contextualized Landscape-scale Assessment
Heartwood work with a group of ISEAL Members on designing impact assessment for landscape-scale initiatives - developing guidance to help partners bring greater equity, transparency and credibility to claims.
Sustainable Agriculture & Supply Chains
Sustainable Agriculture + Farmer ROI
Heartwood has worked on several initiatives with Sustainable Food Lab (SFL) and global food and beverage companies towards ambitious sustainable agriculture goals, including improving returns on investment (ROI), resiliency, premiums, and worker wages for farmers applying sustainable and regenerative agriculture practices.
Textile Standard Revision
Heartwood supported the revision of the Textile Exchange sustainability standard, based on a systems approach that emphasizes risk management and a vision for more humane, environmentally responsible and socially just textile supply chains.
Multi-Stakeholder Living Wage Initiative
From 2019-2023, Heartwood worked with IDH on a multi-stakeholder initiative to galvanize agriculture suppliers, buyers and certification systems to advance on living wages across supply chains, including new tools to enable wage transparency and action.
Monitoring, Evaluation & Learning (MEL)
Heartwood helped Fair Trade International leverage their conformance data for MEL reporting through analysis of best practices and innovation in sustainability reporting.
Living Income Research & Guidance
Heartwood Principal, Jessica Grillo, served on the Technical Advisory Committee of the Living Income Community of Practice (LICoP) from 2017-2024 and wrote several papers and guidance on measuring gaps in economic equity among farmers certified to sustainable agriculture standards.
Supply Chain Employment
Heartwood worked with GIZ and corporate partners to better understand employment and compensation systems across supply chains, in order to make informed and meaningful investments to improve worker wages.
Human Rights Due Diligence & Policy
Aldi Living Wage Pilot
In 2022 and 2023, Aldi piloted an innovative living wage verification process on banana farms, with suppliers, traders and unions. As a core partner, Heartwood built capacity among all actors and facilitated dialogs between worker representatives and farm management.
Civil Society Engagement Policy
Heartwood worked with Burton to develop policy on engaging civil society, as part of their alignment and membership with the Fair Labor Association (FLA).
Auditor Training Programs
Heartwood developed and delivered auditor training programs for Impact Buying Academy, to build skills around living wage auditing to strengthen accountability and trust in results.
European Retailer Wage Verification
Heartwood worked with over a dozen European grocery retailers to validate fruit suppliers' reporting on worker wages and estimate living wage gaps.
Living Wage Playbook
Heartwood wrote the Living Wage Playbook for AIM-Progress and its 48 member companies. The "how to guide" aims to help members build and implement living wage strategies for their employees and across their supply chains.
US Living Wage Certification
Jessi co-led the early-stage development of the first living wage certification system for the US, and is now a proud member of the Living Wage For US Board of Directors.