Lesley Mitchell

Global Strategic Lead, Food

Lesley Mitchell is Forum for the Future’s Associate Director for Sustainable Nutrition. She leads Forum’s global work on food, with an expert team covering innovative topics including the future of protein, sustainable animal feed and regenerative agriculture.

Previously Lesley directed an independent consultancy, Good Food Futures Ltd. Lesley worked across a range of international environments to promote large scale change toward sustainable food and farming, from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation to international animal welfare NGOs and with meat and dairy farmers in Latin America, China and Europe. She helped shape UN policy recommendations on livestock, animal welfare and food security, and worked with major multi-stakeholder processes including the Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef and Global Agenda for Sustainable Livestock.

Lesley began her career as an animal welfare scientist at Oxford University, working with industrial poultry producers to adapt animal environments to improve welfare outcomes. As Director of Research and Food Policy at Compassion in World Farming she created their food business engagement team and spearheaded new sustainability research. As Head of International Policy at World Animal Protection, Lesley developed extensive corporate and policy networks on sustainable agriculture.

Contact Lesley

Latest

Sustainability’s secret weapon: Procurement approaches as a way of creating environmental, social and economic value

Business is changing, and procurement is emerging as a secret weapon. Forum's Principal Change Designer, Felicity Butler, discusses the need to rethink procurement processes and buying strategies that are primarily focused on cost-savings and risk mitigation. What’s our alternative and how can we get there?
Step up or step back? Hero or villain? Will business go far enough, fast enough in this decisive decade?

Here, Forum’s Global Strategic Lead for Business, James Payne, hones in on the opportunity for businesses in transition, highlighting four key unlocks: visionary leadership, rethinking supply chains, reimagining consumption and creating an enabling context.
Creating an Enabling Context

Change is possible if businesses step up to help influence, rethink and reshape our economic structures. This includes intellectual property rights, corporate tax regimes, limited liability legal entities, the global financial structure and more. Forum is collaborating with key stakeholders throughout the market ecosystem, such as financial institutions, regulators and civil society organisations, who influence the actions, goals and incentives of businesses.
Transforming Consumption

The true cost of our purchases goes beyond the price tag and can have significant social and environmental consequences. Transforming Consumption aims to engage influencers, media, brands, consumers, and other actors in envisioning and exploring more sustainable ways of consuming and living that are aspirational, affordable, and actionable.

Matthew Foster

Director, Development and Communications
Allison Van Beaver

Administrative Assistant
Clara Hesseler

Team Assistant
Annabel Johnstone

Project Officer
Vi Nguyen

Principal Sustainability Strategist (Sustainable Finance)
Bhairevi Aiyer

Change Strategist
Neil Walker

Change Designer
Felicity Butler

Principal Change Designer
Manali Purohit

Change Strategist
Heather Yaxley

Group HR Manager

The Five Capitals - a framework for sustainability

The Five Capitals Model provides a basis for understanding sustainability in terms of the economic concept of wealth creation or ‘capital’. Any organisation will use five types of capital to deliver its products or services. A sustainable organisation will maintain and where possible enhance these stocks of capital assets, rather than deplete or degrade them.
For a just and regenerative future

Forum for the Future is a leading international sustainability non-profit running out of offices in the UK, US, India and Singapore.
Jobs

We are a growing organisation and we are regularly on the look out for new recruits to join our teams around the world.
Growing our Future US

Working together to accelerate the transition to a just and regenerative agriculture system in the United States.
Sustainability and system change

Climate change, malnutrition, inequality, poverty, ecological degradation. The global challenges we face are so urgent and tricky that we need a solution to match their scale and complexity. This is where system change comes in. We use systems thinking to understand the web of interrelations that create complex problems, anticipate unintended consequences, and identify how and where to take action to meet the SDG goals.
What is Net Positive?

We reinvent strategies for a 1.5°C world. Our Net Positive approach helps business put back more into society and environment than it takes out. Unilever’s pioneering commitment to eliminate fossil fuels from its operations and directly support the generation of more renewable energy than they consume was driven behind the scenes by Forum.
Become a system change agent

Learn more about upcoming system change programmes and express your interest.
Trailblazing sustainability strategies

Leadership in the 2020s is about your organisation’s ability to positively influence its operating context. We help you to understand the opportunities, and then how to unlock them.
Cotton 2040

Cotton 2040 aims to create a resilient cotton industry in an increasingly climate-disrupted world by bringing together stakeholders across the value chain.
6 ways Unilever has achieved success through sustainability - and how your business can too

A year ago this week, Unilever launched its Sustainable Living Plan (USLP), one of the most ambitious strategies that a global company has ever embarked on. Pioneering a bold new business model, the company pledged to double in size at the same time as halving its environmental footprint.