Ruaf Secretariat

Jess joined RUAF in 2018 as a consultant specializing in urban and city region food system governance. She is a lead consultant on the climate and pandemic resilient City Region Food System programme, and works with the RUAF Secretariat and Partners on a variety of projects with topics including food environments, gender and inclusion, multi-stakeholder governance, and application of the food systems perspective. Jess received her PhD in food policy from the Centre for Food Policy, City University London in 2015. Prior to this, she worked as a journalist for over a decade.

Joy Carey is an independent Sustainable Food Systems Planning consultant with a focus on cities. She has worked in sustainable food and farming with the UK and international organic and local food sectors since 1990. Joy is a founding director of Bristol Food Network, coordinator of Bristol’s food partnership, and author of ‘Who Feeds Bristol: Towards a resilient food plan’ (2011) – a city region food system assessment report that has informed RUAF’s work with FAO on City Region Food Systems (CRFS). Since 2016 she has contributed to both CRFS assessment methodology and indicators for tracking progress and to developing the MUFPP monitoring framework for cities.

For the past 20 years, René has been working with RUAF, first at ETC then with RUAF Foundation and since 2019 at Hivos. As Senior Project Manager, he is responsible for planning, implementing and monitoring RUAF/Hivos projects, and the coordination of the RUAF Secretariat, including co-editing the Urban Agriculture Magazine, RUAF’s flagship publication. He is co-author of several books on sustainable food systems and urban agriculture published by RUAF. René facilitates local and international events and provides technical support to cities and partner organisations.