Michael R. Dimock

Michael R. Dimock
Michael R. Dimock.
Nationality	American
Occupation	President, Roots of Change

Michael R. Dimock is President of Roots of Change^[1] (ROC), a nonprofit, non-governmental organization (NGO) whose purpose is to spawn a sustainable food system in California by 2030. ROC currently works with eleven foundations, over 6000 Californians from NGOs, businesses, community groups, and over a dozen state and local government agencies. ROC finds and makes available funds and other resources for leaders and institutions that are collaboratively implementing a multi-sector strategy known as California's Campaign for a New Mainstream in Food, Farms, and Fisheries. In 2008, Dimock led the drafting team and launch of the Declaration for Healthy Food and Agriculture.

Dimock 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 a global agribusiness company and, briefly, as an organic grower 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.

From 1992 to 2006, he founded and led Ag Innovations Network, which provides strategic planning and consensus building services to rural communities, farming and food companies, and government agencies focused on sustainability.

From 2002 to 2006, Dimock served as the first 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, social justice, local food systems, and the pleasures of the table. In addition to US activities, Dimock served on the President's Committee of Slow Food International from 2003 to 2007 where he worked with five other international leaders and Carlo Petrini, Slow Food's founder, to set the movement's international strategy. He has also been Chairman of the Board of the Community Alliance with Family Farmers, California's oldest organization dedicated to sustainable family farms.

Dimock's connection with agriculture stems from early experiences on his cousins' cattle ranch in Santa Clara County in the 1960s and 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 received a BA in US History at UCLA in 1983, 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 Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost campaign. Michael is a 2002 graduate of the California Ag Leadership Program's Class 31. He lives in San Francisco and Sonoma County.

References

1. ^ [1]

• http://www.californiafarmconference.com/joomla/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=34&Itemid=55
• http://www.bioneers.org/node/2564
• http://ceplacer.ucdavis.edu/2009_PlacerGROWN_Farm_Conference/Michael_Dimock,_Keynote_Speaker.htm
• http://www.rodaleinstitute.org/20081009/n1
• http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/02/11/EDKB15RJ1M.DTL&hw=dimock+rominger&sn=001&sc=1000
• http://fora.tv/2008/08/14/Centralization_of_Our_Food_System_Panel#Dimock_on_Large_Scale_Organics

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Name	Dimock, Michael R.
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