WHF Indonesia - HELIANTI HILMAN

Helianti Hilman is a multi-award winning social entrepreneur at the forefront of sustaining Indonesia’s forgotten food heritage. Inspired by Indonesia’s wealth of food biodiversity, indigenous wisdom and spiritualism, in 2008, Helianti left her work as a consultant and founded PT. Kampung Kearifan Indonesia, known as Javara (www.javara.co.id). She believes that sustaining food biodiversity is the key to future food that helps to solve the global diet issues in a sustainable and inclusive manner. Through her initiatives, Javara builds supply chains, works with smallholder farmers and food producers, nurtures rural entrepreneurs, introduce uses of value added technology among producers and creates a wide range of fine organic food products from rural Indonesia to serve the domestic and export markets. To date Javara has worked with tens of thousands of farmers and food artisans across Indonesia, producing over 600 artisanal products of which over 190 are already certified organic for the US, Europe and Japan. Believing in investing to the rural youth, women and indigenous communities as way to build inclusive economic development and to further preserve food biodiversity heritage in its natural ecosystem, in 2017 she launched Sekolah Seniman Pangan (Javara Academy – School of Food Artisans), to educate and facilitate aspiring rural champions to develop creative high added-value rural businesses that are nature and social positive. Helianti’s latest project is to do food mapping from ancient reliefs, manuscripts and cultural expressions and to translate the information into economic opportunities for rural communities.

@heliantihilman