About Betsy
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 like fair trade, food waste and packaging.
She’s 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 in particular. She works towards that aim by focusing on working with leaders and policy, supply chains, consumer habits, education and sustainable development.
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’s regularly invited to speak on a range of social, environmental and leadership issues and sees presenting as a ‘dance’ with audiences, in which communication is two-way.
She was invited to write her first book, ‘Communicating Social and Environmental Issues Effectively,’ which was published in July 2020 by Emerald Publishing and the UK’s PRCA, the largest PR association in Europe. Her main interest as a speaker and a human is engaging leaders and others in dialogue on the topic, 'How connection, play and being human in everything you do can save the world.' You can read about her approach to having a ‘discomfort practice’ to sharpen one’s superpowers here.