NPEW 2018

Elysa Hammond is Vice President of Environmental Stewardship at Clif Bar & Company. Family- and employee-owned, Clif Bar crafts energy food with organic and sustainable ingredients to feed and inspire adventure. She guides the company’s environmental efforts including its ongoing efforts to reduce its climate footprint and waste as well as its sustainability partnerships. Elysa is also editor of the Moving Toward Sustainability newsletter and the Clif Bar & Company All Aspirations Annual Report, and she advises the Clif Bar Family Foundation on environmental grant-making. Under Elysa’s direction, Clif Bar & Company has expanded the company’s use of organic ingredients and achieved retroactive climate neutral status for the company back to 1992. Guided by Elysa’s knowledge of organic farming, launched the unprecedented $1.9 million Seed Matters Initiative to: revitalize public organic crop breeding by funding 17 graduate student fellows in seven universities across five regions; promote U.S. crop genetic diversity; and support American farmers’ roles and rights as seed innovators. Elysa joined Clif Bar in December 2000 as the company’s ecologist. Prior to joining the company, she served as an environmental educator for the New York Botanical Garden. Elysa is an honorary research associate at the Institute of Economic Botany at the New York Botanical Garden and serves on the advisory boards for the National Teach-in on Global Warming Solutions and the Mayor’s Environmental Advisory Committee for the city of New Rochelle, NY. She holds a bachelor’s degree in crop science from California Polytechnic State University and a master’s in forest science from Yale where she specialized in the ecology of food production systems and tropical ecology. Elysa lives in New Rochelle, New York with her husband and three children.