📍Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A. Connor Harbison is the founder of Atlas Urban Farms. Using his product, you can eat fresh Basil grown from a vertical farm that sits on your kitchen wall. Today, he shares his journey as a student founder and environmental innovator.
📍Monterey, California, U.S.A. Erin Duddy is the Director at the Center for Sustainable Finance and Private Wealth, where she is leading their expansion into North America. Today she shares her path to working in sustainable finance, while also breaking down how it works. UN Sustainable Development Goal: 9 · Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure
📍Zurich, Switzerland. Pascal Gally is the founder of Choc des Légendes, an event that gathers Presidents, ambassadors, CEOs, and students to trade wisdom about topics that don't have a space to be discussed in society. UN Sustainable Development Goal: 17 · Partnerships
📍Washington D.C., U.S.A. Kerry Healey is the President of the Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream, and she shares her approach to creating a society where anyone with a dream can achieve it. UN Sustainable Development Goal: 10 · Reduced Inequalities
📍Bangalore, India. Sultan Ahmed is the founder of LXL Ideas, a company that uses film to teach young people about traditional academics as well as how to lead a good life. UN Sustainable Development Goal: 4 · Education
📍Copenhagen, Denmark. Kenneth Mikkelsen is the founder of Futureshifts and the author of The Neo-Generalist: Where You Go is Who You Are . UN Sustainable Development Goal: 4 · Education
📍Bogotá, Colombia. Carolina Ruiz Cubides is the founder of Happy Thinkers, where she helps people design the life of their dreams. UN Sustainable Development Goals: 4 · Education
📍Berlin, Germany. Robert Gierke grew up in the Eastern Bloc of communist Germany, attended university in capitalist America, and lived in the corporate world for most of his career. Something felt missing, so he went on a journey to discover what it was. It turned out to be Purenessity, the company he runs today to help other companies find their purpose. Robert shares his wisdom and a quote that is one of my favorites: “you’re not just a drop in the ocean, but the ocean is also in the drop." U...
📍Tanzania. Frannie Léautier grew up in rural Tanzania, became the Chief of Staff of the World Bank, and is now the CEO of SouthBridge investments. Her experiences in childhood have influenced her approach to developing countries and what she views can be done through sustainable development. She believes under-developed countries, and specifically Africa as a continent, have a unique opportunity to position themselves for the future. UN Sustainable Development Goals: 8 · Decent Work & Econo...
📍West Sussex, England. Nicola Peel spent the last 20 years studying & living in the Amazon rainforest. She has a deep understanding of how our habits as consumers affect the health of the planet, and how the health of the planet affects us as humans. While our relationship with the earth and its biodiversity has degraded, Nicola has several solutions to amend them. UN Sustainable Development Goals: 13 · Climate Action, 14 · Life Below Water, 15 · Life on Land
📍Minneapalis, Minnesota, USA. April Mendez is the CEO of Greenprint Partners and is scaling a concept called green infrastructure. The idea behind it is to supplement grey infrastructure, like pipes and sewers, with green infrastructure, like a garden. In this episode we talk about how green infrastructure is protecting communities, replenishing them with nature, and creating spaces for communities to gather. UN Sustainable Development Goal: 9 · Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure, 11 · Su...
📍Catskills, NY, USA. With 25 years of impact investing experience, Tanya Khotin understands how the space operates. Traditionally investors have evaluated companies by measuring how the world impacts their company, but this is changing. Investors are now measuring how companies affect the world, and they're holding them accountable for it. This new era of investment analysis is being led by people like Tanya. UN Sustainable Development Goals: 4 · Quality Education, 8 · Decent Work & Economic Gr...
📍Denver, CO, USA. The world is changing at its fastest pace ever. New technologies are emerging and growing while existing cracks in the system get bigger. How will these two trends combine to create a brighter future? In this episode, we explore how change is occurring today and the opportunity for systems like DAOs to support that change, especially in regards to supplementing institutional investments in climate change. UN Sustainable Development Goals: 9 · Industry, Innovation, and Infrastr...
📍Los Angeles, CA, USA. Gwen Dittmar is a coach who teaches people how to breathe properly and how to use your breathe to deal with things like anxiety and trauma. UN Sustainable Development Goals: 3 · Good Health & Well-Being, 16 · Peace
📍Abu Dhabi, UAE. For three months, Rastra Bhandari lived in the Himalayan mountains, studying how the water crisis impacted the communities living there. The region provides water to over 2.5 billion people, and with more ice melting from climate change, there are emerging geopolitical tensions between superpowers like China and India. While the water crisis represents a challenge, it also presents an opportunity for us to collaborate through nature, a medium that all of us are connected to. UN...
📍Bondi Beach, Sydney, Australia. Jason Graham-Nye, and he is reinventing how a diaper is made. Current diapers are unsustainable as they are made out of plastic and require one cup of oil to create one diaper. Jason discovered a way to make the same product with different materials. He co-founded gDiapers with his wife, which takes used diapers, composts them in soil, and uses that soil to create the materials for new diapers. Thus creating a circular life for his product. UN Sustainable Develo...
📍Bombay, Maharashtra, India. Mandar Apte is the executive director of cities4peace. He is focused on building more peaceful and compassionate communities and does so by guiding individuals through deep inner transformations. By enhancing their mental and social wellbeing, the social connectedness of people within the community strengthens. UN Sustainable Development Goal: 16 · Peace
📍Los Altos, California, USA. As the former Head of Culture at Zappos, Dr. David Vik was on the ground floor when Zappos designed their company culture. Whether it was the chair shaped like a king’s throne for employees to vent or a policy allowing employees to give each other $50 bonuses, David created a place where people wanted to come to work. In this episode, he shares the secrets to creating strong relationships and connections within organizations. UN Sustainable Development Goal: 10 · Re...
📍Lisbon, Portugal. Tim Leberecht is the co-founder of The House of Beautiful Business, a global think tank on a mission to make business more beautiful. By drawing on the love and romance that comes from the arts and humanities, business can shift to become a way for people to feel alive through what they do, instead of being driven by an exchange of goods and services. UN Sustainable Development Goals: 4 · Quality Education, 10 · Reduced Inequalities, 16 · Peace
📍Sydney, Australia. The original role of business was to provide goods and services to a community. If they harmed the community more than they helped it, like a drug store selling deadly medicine, they would go out of business. Today, however, businesses can survive while being harmful to their communities, because the communities don’t have the same power that they used to have. This dynamic has led to many questions, like what should the impact of a business be? As co-founder of Impact Lab G...
📍Cambridge, MA, USA. Eric McNulty is the Director of the National Preparedness Leadership Initiative at Harvard where he works to amplify the work of those who lead. While most people end up in leadership positions, very few are trained on how to be a leader. He explains the key attributes and tools of leadership that you can use to accelerate yourself and your organization. UN Sustainable Development Goal: 4 · Quality Education
📍San Diego, CA, USA. Alisa Valderrama is the Co-founder and CEO of Futureproof, a company building a better way to understand the financial risk that comes with natural disasters. She explains why it matters to properly account for, prepare for, and allocate resources to climate-resilient projects. UN Sustainable Development Goals: 9 · Industry, Innovation, & Infrastructure, 11 · Sustainable Cities & Communities
📍Olympia, WA, USA. As the Director of the Center for Sustainable Infrastructure, Rhys Roth oversees the systems that support our lives, yet we are blind to. There is an expectation that our food will be fresh, our water will be clean, our toilets will flush, and our devices will charge. As users of this system, we can’t feel its ripple effects, but they are starting to be felt by our planet, the place the system lives in. Our future will depend on us being able to develop infrastructure that no...
📍London, UK. Sarah Little believes in the superpower of stories to inspire. Having lived and spent time in villages in Ethiopia, refugee camps in Kenya, and cities in Syria and Afghanistan, she learned the challenges and dreams of girls her age. Some had been forced to uproot their lives due to war and genocide, others had fathers who forced them to marry before starting their periods, several had started business, and many were the first in their family to attend university. The power of these...
📍Norfolk, CT, USA. Cheryl Heller believes the design of our relationships is the key to solving our social and environmental problems. In today’s economy, it seems as if these topics are left to a select group of individuals who choose to work on them. The reality, however, is that these individuals are just laying the groundwork for the future of business. Every organization will need to be socially and environmentally conscious if they want to survive. Thankfully, we have people like Cheryl, ...
📍Hanover, New Hampshire, USA. As a managing director at LymeTimber, Peter Stein and his team answer one of the toughest questions about the climate crisis: how can we continue to build infrastructure that welcomes more people into the modern economy while conserving the natural state of our environment? Their answer is to have a more balanced relationship with the resources that we use to build society. Instead of squeezing the land for every dollar they can get from it, Peter focuses on keepin...
📍 Portland, Oregon, USA. Dave Chen is dedicated to creating a more sustainable future. An enormous part of that future is dependent on changing the operating system of society on a systemic level. Part of that change is dependent on entrepreneurs and great thinkers to formulate the solutions that will push us forward. Those individuals however need resources behind them to scale their creations on a local, national, and global scale. That is where Dave and his team at Equilibrium Capital play. ...
📍Kathmandu, Nepal. Bidhi Mandal was born and raised in Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal. Growing up there gave her a unique perspective of how our society functions today. Her community, for example, has a different relationship to water than other communities around the world do. She and her family got access to water two days per week due to the scheduled rotation they were on. This life was normal to her, but as she experienced how people outside of her community were living she began to ques...
📍 Wellesley, MA, USA. Cheryl Kiser is the woman who plays at intersections. With her father being the first marine to stand up against the war and her mother starting one of the first natural foods stores in New England, she has been on the cutting edge of taking a stand since childhood. Now working at the Lewis Institute at Babson College, she stands at a new intersection, that she created. Cheryl educates and guides a new generation of entrepreneurs who create social and economic value at the...
📍Boston, USA. Tim Coffin thinks that if you want to change the world, you need to raise capital. Coming from a background in finance, Tim understands how money incentivizes decision making in society. He works at Breckinridge Capital Advisors, a firm based out of Boston that believes in driving change through capital. They are a bond manager that has integrated environmental, social, and governance research into their investment decision process. This allows them to analyze companies from a per...
