Ben Goldsmith began his full-time animal advocacy work in 2004. He joined Farm Forward at its inception in 2007 after working closely with Farm Forward board member Jonathan Safran Foer and Farm Forward founder Dr. Aaron Gross on the internationally best-selling book Eating Animals. With Goldsmith’s leadership Farm Forward has developed a reputation for strategic innovation that has led to the largest animal protection groups in the country—the American Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Global Animal Partnership, the Humane Society of the United States, and others—hiring Farm Forward for a range of consultations that have ultimately improved the lives of hundreds of millions of farmed animals. Goldsmith’s work has helped to bring about industry-wide improvements for farmed animals, including a first-of-its-kind commitment from Unilever, the third-largest consumer goods company in the world, to invest in technology that will help end the horrific practice of killing male layer chicks.
Carter’s work explores how religion and the institution of factory farming affect food choices within the African American community. He is a United Methodist pastor and holds a seat on the steering committee for the prestigious Animals and Religion Group of the American Academy of Religion.
Foer’s bestselling first book, Everything Is Illuminated, was named Book of the Year by The Los Angeles Times and won numerous awards, including the Guardian First Book Prize and the National Jewish Book Award. His second book, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, also a bestseller, was hailed by Salman Rushdie as “ambitious, pyrotechnic, riddling, and above all … extremely moving.” His third book, Eating Animals, offers a critique of factory farming and was written in close collaboration with Farm Forward. Foer has taught writing at Yale and is on the faculty of NYU’s Creative Writing Program.
Gross-Camp is an interdisciplinary conservation scientist with over seventeen years experience working in East African tropical forests. Her overarching interests are integrating social and ecological needs to achieve long-term equitable conservation. In her career, Dr. Gross-Camp has received over twenty prestigious research and leadership awards.
Srinivasan’s research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of environmental social science, post-development politics, and animal studies. Her current research revolves around intersectional approaches to social, ecological and animal justice in the context of contemporary development.
Van Horn spent 15 years in the environmental movement working on campaigns to combat climate change, and is currently leading a nationwide clean energy advocacy campaign at the Sierra Club. She believes that ending factory farming can be a crucial part of the climate action agenda.
McFadden has served Farm Forward in a variety of roles for the past 11 years, starting with his internship with Farm Forward right out of law school. His passion for animal welfare policies and insight into the inner workings of factory farming issues provide a unique understanding of the industry that has been vital in advancing Farm Forward’s mission. In his current role at eBay, McFadden provides counsel to businesses in South Africa, Mexico, Australia, the United Kingdom, and across Europe. McFadden also serves on the boards of two other non-profit organizations.
A former Fortune 1000 business consultant, Steve Gross helped to pioneer the wave of savvy, new outreach strategies to corporate America that has transformed both animal advocacy and corporate support for animal welfare improvements in the last 20 years. Steve has led negotiations between animal advocacy groups and some of the nation’s largest companies, including Burger King, McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Safeway, and Whole Foods. Prior to this work, Steve co-founded and ran the Illinois Humane Political Action Committee, passing an unheard-of 10 animal protection laws in a decade with an average annual budget of less than 50 thousand dollars. Steve also served as one of the founding board members of the nation’s largest animal welfare certification, Global Animal Partnership (GAP), and was the longest serving member of their board when he was replaced as Farm Forward’s GAP representative by Aaron Gross in 2017. Steve lives with his partner and dog in La Mesa, California.
Diane and Marlene Halverson have been on the front lines of efforts to improve conditions for farmed animals around the planet for more than two decades. Diane’s remarkable list of accomplishments includes helping create standards that made Niman Ranch pork the most humane pork available nationally,founding the Animal Welfare Institute’s farm animal welfare program, obtaining the first USDA label that featured animal welfare claims, advising some of the world’s largest food retailers, working closely with Robert F. Kennedy and the Waterkeeper Alliance to stop factory farm pollution, and receiving (alongside Temple Grandin) the Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge Foundation’s Humane Ethics in Action Award. Marlene’s significant contributions to animal welfare include publishing more than a dozen articles on animal agriculture, authoring key reports for the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy and the Minnesota Environmental Quality Board, bringing Swedish deep-bedded swine housing systems to the U.S., assisting in the creation of alternative pork production programs at Iowa State University, and working with teams of scientists and farmers to draft comprehensive cattle husbandry standards.
Dr. Jim Keen, DVM, is a veterinary infectious disease eco-epidemiologist and sustainable agriculture proponent with 25 years of research and field experience in livestock health and production medicine, veterinary public health, zoonotic infections, and biomedicine. His primary focus is on livestock well-being in conventional agriculture settings. Jim’s path to animal protection began when he became a whistleblower in a case of long-term abuse of research farmed animals at the USDA’s Meat Animal Research Center in Nebraska, which was reported in a highly publicized exposé in the New York Times.