Leadership Awards

With the Leadership Awards, the James Beard Foundation is taking a bold step towards the important and complex realms of sustainability, food access, and public health. We hope to shed light on these timely issues by celebrating the visionaries responsible for creating a healthier, safer, and more sustainable food world. This year’s inaugural honorees—who range from urban agriculture heroes to tireless healthy school food pioneers to corporate business leaders—were chosen by an advisory board of a dozen experts committed to advancing food quality and healthful, sustainable practices.

The Leadership Awards recognize specific outstanding initiatives as well as bodies of work and lifetime achievement. Excellence of work, innovation in approach, and scale of impact within a community or the nation were among the criteria used to select this year’s winners.

Winners will be honored at a dinner ceremony that will take place during the James Beard Foundation Food Conference on October 12 in New York City. The evening’s menu will be curated by James Beard Award–winning chefs Michel Nischan and Anne Quatrano. For more information about the ceremony, please email us.

Read our blog posts with the profiles for the following 2011 JBF Leadership Award recipients:

Will Allen
Fedele Bauccio
Debra Eschmeyer
Sheri L. Flies
Jan Kees Vis
Fred Kirschenmann
First Lady Michelle Obama
Janet Poppendieck
Alice Waters
Craig Watson