AFRE Alumna Named 2024 Aspen Food Leaders Fellow
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EmailThe Food Leaders Fellowship was created in 2022. This is the third cohort and Kendra Levine is the second AFRE alumni to receive this honor. Levine is one of 18 fellows in the 2024 cohort.
Food and Society at the Aspen Institute has named an alumna of the Department of Agricultural, Food and Resource Economics (AFRE) graduate program as one of the 2024 Food Leaders Fellows. Kendra Levine graduated from AFRE with her master’s in agricultural economics and currently works for McDonalds as their US Sustainability Lead.
The Food Leaders Fellowship was created in 2022. This is the third cohort and Levine is the second AFRE alumni to receive this honor. Levine is one of 18 fellows in the 2024 cohort.
On their website Food and Society at the Aspen Institute states that they “bring together public health leaders, policymakers, researchers, farmers, chefs, food makers, and entrepreneurs to find practical solutions to food system challenges and inequities.” The fellows program focuses on challenging the members to increase their capacity for change and find collaborators that will help them think bigger in their work and make lasting impacts.
“I was looking for opportunities to do this type of thing,” Levine Shared. “[I wanted] to meet people from outside of my company and from different sectors, think about similar challenges, but from different points of view, and have more diversity of thought. I wanted to be able to learn from other people, to be able to grow personally, but also be able to bring that back into McDonald's.”
The program will last 18 months with programming specifically curated by the Aspen Institute. The fellows of the program will be required to develop action plans that they can take back to their day-to-day work to have an impact in their specific fields.
Levine leads the McDonald’s US Sustainability team which covers supply chain and restaurant sustainability. Prior to this role, she led McDonald’s relationship with their Latin American franchisees on all things supply chain related as their Field Service Director, and prior to that, led McDonald’s US supply chain climate strategy and their coffee sustainability globally. Before McDonald’s, she worked in international agricultural development with smallholder subsistence farmers in Kenya with One Acre Fund and Guatemala with Fundación AGIL.
Levine has a master’s and bachelor’s degree in Agricultural Economics from Michigan State University and University of Florida, respectively. In 2019 she was named one of University of Florida’s “40 under 40.” Kendra resides in Chicago with her husband, mother-in-law, and cat and enjoys traveling to beautiful landscapes, gardening, biking, and salsa dancing.
Levine is an alumna from the class of 2015, and is following a previous AFRE alumnus, Brian Bartle (2019), who was named an Aspen Fellow.
To learn more about the Food Leaders Fellowship click here.
