
Food Leaders Fellowship
Food & Society’s Food Leaders Fellowship unites the country’s most promising early-stage food system leaders to ignite personal transformation, cross-sector collaboration, and scalable change. Drawing on the Aspen Institute’s history of successful leadership and policy fellowships, the Food Leaders Fellowship is the foremost community of emerging leaders working to create a fair, sustainable, and healthy food system.
Launched with an inaugural cohort in 2022, the Food Leaders Fellowship motivates fellows to support and challenge each other to think bigger, increase their individual and group capacity for change, and find new collaborators to work with toward lasting impact.
Meet the 2025 Food Leaders Fellows

Food & Society is excited to welcome its fourth cohort of 18 emerging leaders to the Food Leaders Fellowship community. Among them are fellows combating nutritional insecurity through innovative food recovery methods and Food is Medicine initiatives, spearheading regenerative agriculture strategies at multinational companies, and cultivating the next generation of food and agriculture specialists and policymakers.
Bringing personal experience and a professional focus on the challenges of the food system, these fellows will collaborate across the system’s divides to address issues through new approaches.
The fellowship experience
Meet the Inaugural FLF Cohort
Meet the Second FLF Cohort
Meet the Third FLF Cohort
Our Fellows
FLF News
Food that Nourishes Communities: Tom McDougall on Creating a More Equitable Food System
The US food production industry is an impressively vast and [...]
Food & Society at the Aspen Institute Announces 2024 Food Leaders Fellows
The Food Leaders Fellowship at the Aspen Institute grew today [...]
Turning Fellows Into Friends in Mexico City
The mood around the tables ranged from excited to [...]
Become a fellow
Applications for the Food Leaders Fellowship’s fourth cohort are now closed. If you are interested in becoming a Food Leaders Fellow, please join our newsletter list for the 2026 cohort.
Seminar dates for the fourth cohort are: August 10-15, 2025; April 29-May 2, 2026; and February 3-6, 2027.
