Tom Kat Ranch

Kat Taylor is a dedicated advocate for social justice and environmental sustainability, striving to create a more equitable world by aligning values in banking and land stewardship. In 2007, she and her husband, Tom Steyer, co-founded Beneficial State Bank, a certified B Corporation. The following year, Kat and Tom founded TomKat Ranch—a 1,800-acre cattle ranch in the San Francisco Bay Area dedicated to broadcasting and de-risking regenerative practices. As President of TomKat Foundation, Kat champions environmental sustainability and serves on boards supporting regenerative farming and healthier communities.

Grounded Capital

Stephen Hohenrieder has spent the past twenty years focused on investing private capital at scale to build a more regenerative food system. He serves as the CEO of Grounded Capital which primarily invests in agricultural land and production, and established mission driven food companies with transparent supply chains that create demand for regenerative agriculture output.

Black Farmer Fund

Olivia Watkins (she/her) serves as Co-Founder and President at Black Farmer Fund. Olivia is a social entrepreneur and impact investor. For the past seven years, she has financed, developed, and operated environmental and social projects across the US. She also serves as a board member for Iroquois Valley Farmland REIT.

Prior to founding Black Farmer Fund in 2017, Olivia worked in several production roles at Soul Fire Farm Institute and Kahumana Organic Farms, leveraging her environmental biology background to manage and grow environmentally regenerative and socially impactful business operations.

Foodshed Capital

Erica Hellen is the Chief Development Officer at Foodshed Capital. She leads all aspects of development alongside the CEO, integrating fundraising, donor engagement, and storytelling into a cohesive strategy. Erica oversees grants, major gifts, and donor systems, while supporting Foodshed Capital’s investment note program and guiding messaging, impact reporting, and partnership development.

Locus Capital

Dalila Boclin serves as the Director of Food Systems Investment at LOCUS Impact Investing, focusing on sustainable food systems using braided capital to unlocking resources for local communities and community development financial institutions. She also serves as a co-chair for the Sustainable Supply Chain working group under the DC Food Policy Council.

Agricultural Platform Collective

Nanyelis is Director of Partnerships at the Agricultural Platform Collective (APC), where she connects and develops relationships across a statewide network of food hubs, institutions, and regional organizations in support of APC's strategy and technical assistance work. She previously built and led Growing the Table, a statewide COVID-19 food justice program that delivered over 1.2 million pounds of produce from 452 farmers and ranchers of color to underserved California communities.

Cooperative Food Empowerment Directive

For the past decade, Teia Evans has worked to provide access to tools for cooperative development and building thriving communities. She currently serves as the Executive Director of the Cooperative Food Empowerment Directive (CoFED). Teia is a proud graduate of Morgan State University, and she earned her Juris Doctorate and Master of Business Administration degrees at North Carolina Central University School of Law.

Glynwood Center for Regional Food & Farming

Dr. Larmer is the Vice President of Programs at the Glynwood Center for Regional Food and Farming in New York's Hudson Valley. She leads with a focus on collaborative, community-centered projects that build the relationships necessary for systemic change. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Exeter where she is a fellow of the Center for Rural Policy Research and an MA in Food Anthropology from SOAS, University of London.

North Carolina A&T State University Cooperative Extension

Dr. Mark Blevins is the Assistant Extension Administrator for Cooperative Extension at NC A&T State University where he leads Agriculture and Natural Resources Programming to connect campus research and resources to small farmers across the state. Blevins has worked in Cooperative Extension since 2002 in tribal, urban, suburban, and coastal communities throughout the state with a focus on small-scale operations and sustainable agriculture. His role at NC A&T leverages preeminent resources at the nation’s largest HBCU to equip growers with the knowledge, skills, and resources they need to make even greater impacts in Agriculture.

Federation of Southern Cooperatives

Mellissa Craig serves as Regional Marketing Coordinator for SOCO Marketing, LLC, the marketing subsidiary of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund, where she is leading efforts to strengthen market access for Black farmers and cooperatives across the Federation’s seven-state Southern footprint. Her work focuses on building the shared infrastructure, systems, partnerships, and aggregation strategies needed to connect producer capacity with institutional and wholesale market opportunities for more resilient regional food systems.

Tom Kat Ranch

Kat Taylor is a dedicated advocate for social justice and environmental sustainability, striving to create a more equitable world by aligning values in banking and land stewardship. In 2007, she and her husband, Tom Steyer, co-founded Beneficial State Bank, a certified B Corporation. The following year, Kat and Tom founded TomKat Ranch—a 1,800-acre cattle ranch in the San Francisco Bay Area dedicated to broadcasting and de-risking regenerative practices. As President of TomKat Foundation, Kat champions environmental sustainability and serves on boards supporting regenerative farming and healthier communities.

Grounded Capital

Stephen Hohenrieder has spent the past twenty years focused on investing private capital at scale to build a more regenerative food system. He serves as the CEO of Grounded Capital which primarily invests in agricultural land and production, and established mission driven food companies with transparent supply chains that create demand for regenerative agriculture output.

Black Farmer Fund

Olivia Watkins (she/her) serves as Co-Founder and President at Black Farmer Fund. Olivia is a social entrepreneur and impact investor. For the past seven years, she has financed, developed, and operated environmental and social projects across the US. She also serves as a board member for Iroquois Valley Farmland REIT.

Prior to founding Black Farmer Fund in 2017, Olivia worked in several production roles at Soul Fire Farm Institute and Kahumana Organic Farms, leveraging her environmental biology background to manage and grow environmentally regenerative and socially impactful business operations.

Foodshed Capital

Erica Hellen is the Chief Development Officer at Foodshed Capital. She leads all aspects of development alongside the CEO, integrating fundraising, donor engagement, and storytelling into a cohesive strategy. Erica oversees grants, major gifts, and donor systems, while supporting Foodshed Capital’s investment note program and guiding messaging, impact reporting, and partnership development.

Locus Capital

Dalila Boclin serves as the Director of Food Systems Investment at LOCUS Impact Investing, focusing on sustainable food systems using braided capital to unlocking resources for local communities and community development financial institutions. She also serves as a co-chair for the Sustainable Supply Chain working group under the DC Food Policy Council.

Aspen Digital

B is a technology and facilitation expert focused on empowering people to participate in technological and social governance. As Director of Emerging Technologies at Aspen Digital, a program of the Aspen Institute, they help people navigate the opportunities and tradeoffs of emerging technologies including artificial intelligence. Previously, B advised Senator Ron Wyden on privacy, internet governance, and algorithmic accountability as a Congressional Innovation Fellow, and led research on fairness, transparency, and the future of work at the Partnership on AI. B also serves on the board of Metagov, is a 2026 Siegel Research Fellow, and has held leadership roles at IBM Watson and Exploding Kittens.

Plant Baby Plant

Brian Ratcliffe is a climate optimist and a dad. Before reuniting with his grad school mentor, Robin Wall Kimmerer, to become the first executive director of Plant Baby Plant, Brian spent six years working on climate change issues within the federal government (Forest Service, Department of Energy, State Department). A child of the Rocky Mountains, Brian is an east coast transplant and lives outside Philadelphia with his family.

LabStart

Deepa is the CEO of LabStart, a non-profit which unlocks breakthrough climate innovations out of our national labs and research institutions as well as undercapitalized entrepreneurial talent to launch deep climate technology startups. She has spent the last two decades bringing innovative climate products, programs, and initiatives to life. This includes building out the $35M California Sustainable Energy Entrepreneur Development (CalSEED) program to fund early stage entrepreneurs and investing at one of the earliest climate venture capital firms, Angeleno Group. Deepa holds a bachelor’s degree in Business from the University of Southern California and a master’s degree from UC Berkeley’s Energy and Resources Group.

Metabolic

Eva Gladek is a systems thinker, organizational builder, and the founder and CEO of Metabolic, where she has built or helped launch a dozen sustainability-focused organizations and ventures since 2012. Her current focus is on poly-capital orchestration: structuring the portfolios, capital stacks, and institutions needed to align public, private, philanthropic, and civic capital around the transition of entire regional economies. She is currently deploying this model in the western half of North Carolina, Metabolic's flagship regional engagement, where she serves as Founding Partner of the Resilient Futures Co-Lab.

Okyemen Environment Foundation

After more than 20 years of working with the Okyeman Environment Foundation in Ghana, I am currently a doctoral student in an interdisciplinary program on Human Security, Climate and FinTech at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. My research investigates how community resource governance can more fully reflect indigenous conceptions of Human Security while enabling communities to participate meaningfully in emerging carbon and climate-finance opportunities.

American Sustainable Business Network

Liza LaManna leads agriculture and water policy at the American Sustainable Business Network, building coalitions to advance regenerative agriculture, protect water resources, and influence federal and state policy, empowering businesses to act as catalysts for sustainable change.

LabStart

Megan Holcomb spends her career getting people who don't agree to build things together — communities, agencies, funders, and companies — in service of climate resilience. As COO of LabStart, she channels that skill into strategic partnerships and funding strategies that move climate technology from lab to deployment. A former Senior Drought Specialist for the State of Colorado, she was appointed by Governor Polis to the state's first Environmental Justice Advisory Board, founded Colorado's Interagency Climate Team, and managed the statewide Drought Task Force (emergency response) in response to the 2020-2022 extreme drought.

Hudson Valley Food Systems Coalition

Sarah Salem (They/Them) is a food systems strategist and network convener dedicated to advancing regional food security and equity through a nature-based, systems-thinking lens. As founder of the Hudson Valley Food Systems Coalition, they convene over 100 stakeholders across agriculture, policy, emergency food, and community development to foster collaboration, pilot innovative programs, and shape regional food system strategies.

Salem’s work focuses on designing and implementing equitable food access initiatives, including farm-to-community aggregation and distribution models that strengthen connections between regional farmers and communities.

Buckminster Fuller Institute

Sara Blenkhorn is Director of Innovation at the Buckminster Fuller Institute, where she's redesigning how founders and institutions govern, own, and structure themselves for the AI era. She founded Canada's first circular economy lab for the fashion industry, is a C40 Women4Climate award recipient, and has shaped climate policy across multiple levels of government.

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