Keynote Speaker: Kimbal Musk
Kimbal Musk is the Co-Founder of The Kitchen, a growing family of businesses that pursues an America where everyone, everywhere has access to real food. His restaurants source food directly from local farmers, stimulating the local farm economy to the tune of millions of dollars a year. His non-profit builds Learning Gardens in schools around the U.S. reaching hundreds of thousands of students every school day. His urban, indoor vertical farming accelerator, seeks to empower thousands of millennials to become real food farmers.
Kimbal was just named a 2017 Social Entrepreneur by the World Economic Forum.
Kimbal is on the board for Chipotle, Tesla, and SpaceX. Follow him on Twitter @Kimbal and Instagram @KimbalMusk
Featured Speakers
Hussein Amery
Director
Division of Liberal Arts & International Studies, Colorado School of Mines
Dr. Hussein A. Amery is an associate professor and interim director for the Division of Liberal Arts & International Studies at Colorado School of Mines. His expertise includes, water and food security, human and environmental security, environmental conflict resolution, and Middle East culture, politics and history.
Dr. Amery has published two books, Arab Water Security: Threats and Opportunities in the Gulf States (Cambridge University Press) and Water in the Middle East: A Geography of Peace (Texas University Press), as well as a variety of papers on issues like the potential for water war and conflict resolution along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Outside of his academic achievements, Dr. Amery formerly worked as a consultant to U.S. government agencies, Canada's International Development and Research Center, and American engineering firms. Read more
Jody Beck
Assistant Professor
School of Landscape Architecture, University of Colorado Denver
As assistant professor at CU Denver's School of Landscape Architecture, Dr. Jody Beck has tought a variety of courses including, "Addressing Hunger in NW Aurora: Production, Access & Jobs" and "Infrastructure and Utopia". His research interests are community food systems/food sovereignty, environmental and social justice, and urban history and theory.
Dr. Beck's awards include the Merit Award for art, landscape, performance, life, Ellerslie Garden Show, Christchurch, New Zealand (2010) and Special Initiatives Volunteer Award, Community Design Collaborative Philadelphia (2006). In 2014, Dr. Beck received a grant for a pilot study on the "Inventory of the Urban Agricultural Potential for the Denver Metropolitan Area" at CU Denver, Office of Research Services. Read more
Ashley Colpaart
Co-Founder and CEO
The Food Corridor
Ashley Colpaart co-founded and acts as CEO of The Food Corridor, the first online marketplace for food businesses to connect with available commercial food assets. Food businesses can find and book commercial kitchens, equipment, commissaries, processors, co-packers, and food storage spaces.
Colpaart is a doctoral candidate in Interdisciplinary Studies in Food Science and Food Safety and has an MS in Food Policy and Applied Nutrition from Tufts University. She is also Co-Founder of the Northern Colorado Food Cluster. Read more
Thomas J. Dean
Professor of Entrepreneurship and Sustainable Enterprise
Department of Management, Colorado State University
Professor Dean studies, teaches, and consults in the areas of business strategy, entrepreneurship, and sustainable venturing. He focuses his programmatic and conceptual efforts on understanding business strategies and economic opportunities present in emerging social and environmental trends. He has published over 50 manuscripts on these topics including articles in journals such as the Academy of Management Journal, the Strategic Management Journal, and the Journal of Business Venturing. He also authored a book entitled, “Sustainable Venturing: Entrepreneurial Opportunity in the Transition to a Sustainable Economy.” He won the Dr. Alfred N. and Lynn Manos Page Prize for Sustainability Issues in Business Curricula, awarded by the University of South Carolina Moore School of Business.
Professor Dean teaches in CSU’s Global, Social, and Sustainable Enterprise MBA Program. He also consults with companies, and serves on the Board of Directors for a Cleantech Venture in the engine efficiency space. During his tenure at the University of Colorado, he served as Academic Director at the Deming Center for Entrepreneurship, and founded the Sustainable Venturing Initiative, the Cleantech Venture Challenge, and the first sustainable venturing course in the United States. Read more
Cullen Hendrix
Associate Professor, Sié Chéou-Kang Center for International Security and Diplomacy
Josef Korbel School of International Studies at DU
Dr. Cullen Hendrix is an associate professor at the Sié Chéou-Kang Center for International Security and Diplomacy at the Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver, Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, and Senior Research Advisor at the Center for Climate & Security. At the Korbel School, he directs the Environment, Food and Conflict (ENFOCO) Lab, which leverages collaborations between physical and social scientists and policymakers to produce scholarship and analysis on issues at the intersection of the environment, food security, and conflict.
His first co-authored book, Confronting the Curse: The Economics and Geopolitics of Natural Resource Governance, was published in 2014. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation’s Coupled Natural and Human Systems program, the US Department of Defense Minerva Initiative, the Carnegie Corporation, and the Smith Richardson Foundation, and he was a pre-doctoral fellow at the Peace Research Institute, Oslo. He holds a PhD and MA from the University of California, San Diego, where he was a fellow of the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, and a BA from Kalamazoo College. Prior to joining the Korbel School, he held faculty positions at the College of William & Mary and the University of North Texas. Read more
Fred Kirschenmann
Distinguished Fellow, Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture
Iowa State
A longtime national and international leader in sustainable agriculture, Fred Kirschenmann shares an appointment as Distinguished Fellow for the Leopold Center and as President of Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in Pocantico Hills, New York. He also continues to manage his family's 1,800-acre certified organic farm in south central North Dakota.
Kirschenmann is a professor in the ISU Department of Religion and Philosophy and holds a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Chicago. He has held numerous appointments, including the USDA's National Organic Standards Board and the National Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production operated by the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and funded by Pew Charitable Trusts.
In April 2010, the University Press of Kentucky published a book of Kirschenmann's essays, Cultivating an Ecological Conscience: Essays from a Farmer Philosopher, that traces the evolution of his ecological and farming philosophy over the past 30 years. Read more
Pete Newton
Assistant Professor, Coordinator for Sustainable Food Systems Specialization (SFS)
University of Colorado Boulder
Pete Newton is an assistant professor in the Environmental Studies program at the University of Colorado Boulder, and an instructor for the MENV program. He is an interdisciplinary scientist who is interested in understanding how governance interventions affect synergies and trade-offs between environmental, economic, and social outcomes in socio-environmental systems. He works principally in agricultural and tropical forest landscapes, mainly in Brazil but also with partners in Indonesia, Mozambique, Nepal, and elsewhere. Much of his work focuses on sustainable food systems, land-use change, and rural livelihoods.
Pete received his BA (Zoology) from the University of Cambridge, UK, and his master’s (Applied Ecology and Conservation) and PhD (Environmental Sciences) from the University of East Anglia, UK. Read More
Dorceta Taylor
Professor and James E. Crowfoot Collegiate Chair; Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; Past Chair of the Environment and Technology Section of the American Sociological Association
University of Michigan
Dorceta Taylor is a professor at the School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Michigan. Her research interests include urban agriculture, food access and food insecurity; institutional diversity; analysis of the composition of the environmental workforce; social movement analysis; environmental justice; leisure and natural resource use; poverty; and race, gender, and ethnic relations. Taylor's current research includes an assessment of food access in Michigan and other parts of the country.
Other research activities include the 2014 national report analyzing racial and gender diversity in the environmental field, The State of Diversity in Environmental Organizations: Mainstream NGOs, Foundations, and Government Agencies. Taylor's 2009 book, The Environment and the People in American Cities (Duke University Press), is an award-winning urban environmental history book. She also published an edited volume in 2010 entitled, Environment and Social Justice: An International Perspective (Emerald Press) and Toxic Communities: Environmental Racism, Industrial Pollution, and Residential Mobility (NYU Press) in 2014. Her newest book, Power, Privilege, and Environmental Protection: Social Inequality and the Rise of the American Conservation Movement (Duke University Press) was published in 2015. Read more
Damien Thompson
Associate Professor of Sociology, Regis College
Regis University
“One of the responsibilities of a professor is to meet students where they are and find ways to inspire them,” says Dr. Damien Thompson. For five years as an associate professor of sociology in Regis College, he has been doing just that. Thompson received his undergraduate degree in sociology from Elon University and his Ph.D. in anthropology from American University. He applied to Regis because he was intrigued by the prospect of working at a small, Jesuit, liberal arts college.
Thompson is on the board for Green Leaf Denver, an organization that helps young people develop leadership skills and personal power through urban agriculture. Thompson also works with the Grow Haus, an indoor urban farm committed to food justice. In September, he was asked by Mayor Michael Hancock to be a part of a task force for the Denver Seeds initiative. Read more