My Sustainability Journey
Growing up, I loved nature. I played in the woods and the river behind my house, pretending I was Mowgli from the Jungle Book. But I didn’t know it as the “environment”. Like most people, I didn’t think of it on a grand scale.
It wasn’t until I moved to Boulder, CO in 2015 that my awareness of the environment expanded, very quickly and my journey as a sustainability nerd began.
I was hired on as a designer at Simple Energy and learned that there are reasons for people to conserve energy besides saving money. I learned about how much coal is burned to power a lightbulb and where regular people can make a difference in their homes. And equally as important– how to motivate people to take action and make that difference. As someone who had just come from a job in the game industry, I had ideas about how the platform could better harness their motivated users. This lead me to create the Challenges Redesign Proposal.
Even after moving on from Simple Energy I continued to explore and push my limits on how I could make a difference. I started with my passion for food and found how to make my kitchen as eco friendly as possible through shopping smart, meal prepping and waste management.
I volunteered in Puerto Rico building Earthships which use a radically eco-friendly style of building.
At work, I motivated my colleagues through a week-long Earth Day event and gave a speech about my journey.
After a few years of focusing on the efforts of individuals to make a difference, I began to wonder about how other entities with more pull might be able to make a difference– such as business and government. Why should it be up to little old me alone? How might I have a bigger impact? The questions begged.
When I found out about Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and the course hosted by Pete Dignan at LEEDs School of Business at CU, I leaped at the chance to enroll. Finally an environment that would push me to think multidimensionality about sustainability, and as a bonus would push my knowledge about business, too. The course was a challenge and pushed the boundaries of my knowledge and my mind. What I learned opened my eyes to how bad things really are but also how many amazing and innovative things people are doing and how much room for action and improvement there is.
By the end of class, I felt that I had a good view of the bigger picture of CSR and was able to piece together how my current role fits into the picture.
Today, this is how I see it: Everyone has an opportunity to make a difference. Even if you are one person with a small idea, you have the potential to set off a huge ripple effect, inspiring others to also take action. The change we are all hoping for will not come to us in one fell swoop– it will take many people and small actions to get there.
I am still working on (and probably always will be working on) my journey to be a better eco-warrior. I am currently on a sabbatical to Australia to work on organic farms and get inspired to start a side gig– a plant based food business– when I get home. There is a lot I would like to do in the future and I look forward to partnering with others who inspire and take meaningful actions to make the world a more sustainable place.
