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I started a design thinking firm focused on sustainability

As an avid runner and overall outdoorsy person, one thing is crystal clear to me: rapid climate change threatens our planet — and it’s a dire reality we are all facing. Raging forest fires, powerful hurricanes, drought, and melting glaciers have led to severe displacement of people in every part of the world. And as the climate warms and ocean levels rise, an albedo effect takes hold — the more ice that melts, the more dark surfaces exist, which results in higher uptake of energy. This means the planet is warming faster and faster and the runs I go on are changing before my eyes.

Luckily, I’m not alone in realizing drastic changes need to be made to preserve the environment. Corporations and federal and local governments have developed sustainability teams to meet ambitious GHG reduction targets. However, these teams are often extremely small, pressed for time, and spread thin as they address a wide array of sustainability issues ranging from equity to renewable deployment to mitigation to water to transportation. Each of these areas of focus have specific challenges that can be overwhelming for a small team to tackle, which often results in problem statements that are framed in broad sweeping strokes. As a result, sustainability teams work long hours, but take a significant amount of time to address the wide array of issues that need urgent attention.

These challenges made wonder “how might we add creative capacity to sustainability teams with ambitious goals?” That’s why I started Sustain Tomorrow, a design firm that uses the power of collective creativity to fight climate change. Sustain Tomorrow provides pop-up innovation labs, expert design thinking facilitation, and consulting services to help companies quickly meet growth targets while fighting our climate crisis.

As the founder and CEO of the company, it’s been an amazing process of learning, visioning, wearing multiple hats, and growing. I constantly practice leadership and project management in this role — I hired and trained an interdisciplinary team of facilitators with backgrounds in design thinking, environmental science, renewable energy engineering, psychology, education technology, music, project management, and improv to bring the workshops to life.

I also care deeply about bringing aesthetically pleasing design to the environmental space. I’ve brought UI/UX design skills to Sustain Tomorrow through creating a website and associated materials such as 2-pagers and marketing materials. To grow the business, I conducted empathy interviews with over 150 sustainability managers, energy consultants, philanthropies, and university professors around the world to better understand pressing challenges within the environmental sector. With a better understanding of the needs in this space ranging from packaging to gaining buy-in from leadership, I was able to develop tailored design thinking curriculum focused on sustainability.

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