HIFS Speakers

Michael Dimock is Executive Director of the Roots of Change (ROC). The purpose of ROC is to spawn a sustainable food system for California by the year 2030. ROC identifies and leverages resources and opportunities for a diverse alliance of leaders and their institutions that are unified by strategy and collaborate in pursuit of ROC’s purpose. ROC currently involves fifteen foundations, over 400 leaders from NGOs and businesses, and over a dozen state and local government leaders.

Michael has focused on agriculture and the food system since 1989 and has worked on both ends of the spectrum, as a marketing executive in Europe for Riverbend International, a global agribusiness company, and briefly as an organic farmer in Sonoma County. Since the early 1990s, he has been helping communities, NGOs, and businesses to build consensus and implement plans related to agricultural policy and marketing, resource stewardship, and sustainability. Michael is the former Chairman of Slow Food USA, a nonprofit organization dedicated to creating a good, clean, and fair food system, with particular emphasis on food bio-diversity, creating meaningful links between producers and consumers, and the pleasures of the table. In addition to US activities, Michael serves on the President’s Committee of Slow Food International where he works with seven other international leaders and Carlo Petrini, Slow Food’s founder, to set the movement’s international strategy.

Michael’s love and convictions surrounding agriculture stem from early experiences on his cousin’s cattle operation in Santa Clara County in the 1960s & 70s and a 1979 stint in Nepal on a development project where he lived with subsistence farming families in a rural village in the Himalayan foothills. He studied US History as an undergraduate at UCLA, writing his honors thesis on the origins of the CIA. He earned his Masters in International Affairs in 1988 at Columbia University, where he specialized in Soviet Studies with a particular emphasis on media coverage of Gorbachev’s glasnost campaign. He lives in San Francisco and Sonoma County.