Geraldine Gilbert

I work in Forum's food team, and manage a wide range of food-related partnerships and projects. I also help run and develop the Forum Network - the big family of all our members and partners - with a particular focus on helping our teams outside the UK.

I joined Forum for the Future in April 2007, having worked my way back to London via India, France, Spain and Morocco.

Since studying anthropology and human rights, my journey’s included: the Fairtrade Foundation – in the early days of Fairtrade Towns and Universities, with a spot of fundraising; north-Indian health and education centre Nishtha - running workshops and classes for village kids, Tibetan students and visiting doctors, and interviewing candidates for the “1000 women for Nobel Peace Prize” campaign; the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative’s police reform projects in Delhi; fair trade foods brand Alter Eco in Paris - juggling external relations with consumers, students, farmers and supporters, online sales and lots of chocolate taste tests; Sunseed sustainable living project in southern Spain - learning to nurture organic food, seedlings and saplings in semi-arid places; and some time in Morocco in the wonderful world of olive oil, argan trees and women’s co-operatives.

Then I decided to see how it all fitted together in the bigger picture – Forum for the Future was the perfect next step and I never looked back.

My dream project? Anything that gets us all closer to a happy, healthy, resilient food system. I believe in people! Rules and models are made up by us, so we can change them! And organisations are really no more than groups of individuals who make decisions – so I love to see people get together to share their stories, give each other moral support and together come up with ways to make things happen – and then do it! I'm also keen on anything that helps the "little guy" - small-scale farmers, small pioneering brands and budding entrepreneurs.

What floats my boat outside work? In any spare time available, I’m a keen balcony gardener, and "graduate" of Foodfromthesky’s Seed2seed programme. I'm also a trustee of Nishtha UK Trust. In early 2012 I was lucky enough to take a three-month sabbatical travelling around South America and hanging out with cocoa farmers in the San Martin region who are part of an innovative forest protection programme supported by Pur Projet - I'm currently looking at ways to support their conservation/reforestation project from the UK. And somehow I also manage to fit in the odd French-English translation for The Natural Step France and other like-minded folk.

Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/pub/geraldine-gilbert/28/86a/615
Twitter: @treehousegg