“JENNY, WHO’S YOUR DO-GOODER HERO?”

1 minute read

I feel like right now in the UK there’s a real momentum of people cutting through and pioneering for a better planet. It’s so uplifting to see this growing wave of green entrepreneurs taking centre stage – but makes it tricky to land on just one do-gooder!

But if I had to pick one, it’d have to be Ertharin Cousin

As a global non-profit leader, Etharin has been my hero for a long time. I was lucky enough to meet Ertharin in Davos in 2015, when she was a lawyer serving as the twelfth Executive Director of the United Nations World Food Programme. A year after we met, she was then listed as Forbes 48^th most powerful women globally, and received the Humanitarian Award from Action Against Hunger. She’s a trailblazer championing force for good on such an enormous scale, it was impossible not to be inspired.

I remember going away and reading more about some of her work, which at the time was a project focused on identifying climatic disasters before they hit, giving people valuable time for proactive measures. I just don’t think it gets any more impressive than that!

More recently she founded Food Systems for the Future, with aims to end hunger, and continues to urge others to work in pursuit a better world. Here’s a brilliant quote of hers from the archives:

“Let us proudly be the crazy ones, the ambitious ones, the ones who see beyond the limits of today, who capture the opportunities, who find the resources that will build a better tomorrow, not for ourselves, but for those depending upon us to get it right.”

ERTHARIN COUSIN