Maria Balcazar Tellez

Maria Balcazar Tellez is a Meridian Affiliate based in the United Kingdom. She specializes in practical applications of systems thinking, design, and emergent strategies in the food space. She has supported Meridian’s work with the UN Foundation and their efforts to support agroecological research under the Aim for Climate initiative. As Project Lead, Maria is working with Meridian in their systems mapping efforts to track and understand the current landscape of food system initiatives. She is also working to support the Food Forward Consortium efforts, a global consortium of non-state actors committed to driving food systems transformation.

Over the last 10 years, Maria has focused on understanding food systems, exploring pathways to their transformation, and activating teams to co-build their food futures by designing and facilitating collaborative processes. As program manager, Maria co-designed and helped run the Food System Vision Prize alongside SecondMuse. This highly complex, Rockefeller Foundation-backed global program engaged 1,300+ communities to develop regional visions and actionable solutions in their local food systems. This work embraced the complexity of global food systems and was deeply rooted in the program’s vision to support communities in becoming the protagonists of their own future. Maria’s unique agricultural engineering and public policy background has brought her to work with diverse clients, including The World Bank, Food System 6, Oxfam International, The Rockefeller Foundation, UC Berkeley, and UC Davis, among many others.

Maria lives in Brighton with her husband and two cats, where she loves listening to live music and doing cold dips in the sea. On sunny days, you might find her learning new tricks on her roller skates.