Betsy Reed is an accomplished speaker, author and leader on social and environmental issues. She has been focused on social justice, racial equity, LGBTQI+ and the environment for nearly 30 years, having started early as a volunteer for local political campaigns and community organising in her native Wyoming from the age of 10. She holds advanced degrees in politics and has developed an international career over the past 17 years working with clients and collaborators around Europe, the UK, the US, Africa and Asia. She’s created and directed high-profile national campaigns on issues such as fair trade and changing behaviours on food waste. She led sustainability public affairs work for the world’s biggest food company, and worked as an independent consultant advising executives in the food, tech and fashion industries on sustainability strategy, risk, and internal and external engagement.
Betsy’s passion is ensuring that systems, habits and policy approaches ultimately have a positive impact on women and children. She works towards that aim by focusing on policy, supply chains, consumer habits, education and sustainable development approaches. Her holistic perspective is informed by her work as a yoga and mindfulness teacher, which in turn is informed by her career as a sustainability leader. Betsy understands that everyone and everything exists in an interconnected ecosystem, and she is uniquely skilled at challenging, inspiring and supporting leaders and teams to connect to themselves to change the wider world.
Betsy is an award-winning director of innovative behaviour change approaches and is a polished, engaging and warm presence on-stage, on the radio and in lecture theatres. She was invited to write her first book, ‘Communicating Social and Environmental Issues Effectively,’ published in summer 2020 by Emerald Publishing and the UK’s PRCA, the largest PR association in Europe.
She is regularly invited to speak at and chair events, sits on the Glasgow Caledonian Business School International Business Advisory Group, tutors at Cambridge University and Blanquerna in Barcelona and is a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts (RSA), which brings together Fellows around the world in a network of people focused on enriching society through ideas and action.
In November 2020 she launched a podcast, 'The Discomfort Practice,' which explores how positive discomfort has shaped how individual leaders, creatives, athletes, activists and others show up in their own lives and affects how they influence the world around them.
Betsy is both American and British and is based in Barcelona.
Her main speaking topics are:
* 'How connection, play and being human in everything you do can save the world'
* 'The future of work in a post-covid world'
* 'How living your values and being human can change the world of work and change the world'
* 'How to be an activist in whatever you do'
