Herb Barbolet, PhD

Herb Barbolet has been active in community development for more than 30 years - Working in community planning, energy conservation, citizen participation, cooperative housing, and food and agriculture. He now works in food policy research, projects and programmes: linking food to community economic development, health and safety, environment, social justice, and international development - from the very local to the global. He is one of the leading food activists in North America. Herb has a B.A. in Urbanism, a Masters in Community Development, and doctoral studies in Community Development and later in Community Planning and Political Economy. As Associate with the Centre for Sustainable Community Development at Simon Fraser University since 2003 he has co-authored food assessment studies for provincial health authorities and a guide to food assessments for the provincial health services authority.

Herb consulted on the establishment of the Vancouver Food Policy Council and Year 3 of the SFU Imagine BC Programme. He was the founder, and for 10 years, executive director of FarmFolk/CityFolk, an internationally recognized NGO. Earlier he was the executive director of the Community Planning Association of Canada (BC) for five years and developed cooperative housing for 10 years. He appears regularly on CBC radio Almanac’s Food Panel, and in all media. Herb was a founding member of numerous non-profits (including the Cooperative Housing Federation of BC and the BC Association for Regenerative Agriculture).