Ertharin Cousin

Ertharin Cousin currently serves as the Managing Director and CEO of FSF Ventures, an impact investment fund, and as the CEO of Food Systems for the Future Institute, the Fund’s sister nonprofit. Each organization supports her vision of a world without hunger and malnutrition. Ambassador Cousin also serves as a Distinguished Fellow at the Chicago

Council on Global Affairs; a Bosch Academy, Robert Weizsäcker Fellow; and as a Visiting Scholar at the Stanford University, Center on Food Security and Environment. From 2012 until 2017, Cousin led the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) as Executive Director. During her tenure, the 14,000-member WFP annually provided life sustaining food assistance to over 80 million people. Under her leadership the organization began the longer-term work of identifying, championing, and implementing more sustainable solutions for global hunger and malnutrition.

In 2009, Cousin was nominated and confirmed as the U.S. Ambassador to the UN Agencies for Food and Agriculture in Rome. Where she served from 2009-2012. Prior to her global hunger work, Cousin helped lead the U.S. domestic fight to end hunger, serving as the Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of America’s Second Harvest, now

known as Feeding America. Cousin’s private sector experience includes several years of corporate retail leadership with Albertsons and Jewel Food stores.

Cousin is currently a member of the Bayer AG Supervisory Board, the Mondelez International Board of Directors, Board Chair of Allwyn-North America, and a Trustee of the African agriculture thinktank, Akademia2063.

Cousin is a graduate of the University of Illinois at Chicago; the University of Georgia Law School and the University of Chicago Executive Management Program in Finance for Non- Financial Executives. She has been listed numerous times on Forbes’ 100 Most Powerful Women List, as Fortune’s Most Powerful Woman in Food and Drink, on Time’s 100 Most

Influential People list, and as one of the 500 Most Powerful People on the Planet by Foreign Policy magazine.