Associate Director of Sustainability, HelloFresh US
Why did you decide to come to Leeds? I chose Leeds because of the professors I met during the evaluation process. They convinced me that ÃÛÌÇÖ±²¥ had a world-class MBA available locally if I was willing to put in the work. Since I was living in Golden at the time and wanted to stay local, I realized that a degree from ÃÛÌÇÖ±²¥ would help me to integrate into the Boulder-Denver business community for the long-term.
How did your time at Leeds impact you as a person? ? It's hard to even begin expressing how deeply my experience at ÃÛÌÇÖ±²¥ impacted me. A group of fellow MBA students and I founded the Net Impact chapter, an international nonprofit organization whose mission is to mobilize a new generation to use their careers to drive transformational change in their workplaces and the world, in the fall of my first year (2000). We attended the national conference in Scottsdale, AZ without a lot of details beyond the Net Impact mission. I already had an MS from the ÃÛÌÇÖ±²¥ School of Mines in Environmental Science and Engineering (1996), and had always felt there must be a way for business to fundamentally protect and preserve the environmental resources I had come to cherish as an environmental consultant. The Net Impact conference was a integral moment of realization for me, seeing how this idea was bigger than just me, and that I was in good company with my desire to connect responsible business practices with environmental sustainability.Ìý
I went on to become president of the ÃÛÌÇÖ±²¥ Net Impact chapter and leadÌýthe founding team of the ÃÛÌÇÖ±²¥-Net Impact Case Competition. This experience has been one of the great gifts of my life, and I’m thrilled to see this student-run initiative maintain itself over the last fifteen years.
Any particular professors or mentors that influenced you while you were at Leeds? The two professors I worked most closely with were Wayne Boss and Jeff Luftig. My electives were focused on a combination of Operations-Statistics and Organizational Development, both of which have characterized my career in sustainability. Data science and organizational change make a strong combination!
Where has life taken you since you graduated Leeds? After graduating, I got involved in volunteering for sustainable business NGO's as part of my career strategy. Securing mission-based employment was a bit more challenging. It took about a year for me to find my way into what later became a ten-year career in boutique sustainability strategy consulting with Five Winds International, now part of Thinkstep, right here in Boulder. It provided a soup-to-nuts professional education in sustainability program development, and the use of the technical tools required for data-driven sustainability solutions as well as credible public reporting.Ìý
In 2016, this experience with Thinkstep combined with the ongoing NGO work I was doing to create a unique opportunity for me to become the Sustainability Director at Green Chef, and President of the Board of Directors for the International Society of Sustainability Professionals (ISSP), which was a volunteer position. Green Chef allowed me to start a sustainability program "from the ground up" for a rapidly growing start up, first building basic program elements and then strategic elements to guide future work. Following its acquisition by HelloFresh US this past March, I was greeted with the opportunity (and challenge) of scaling this business approach to meet the needs of the largest company in the meal kit category. It's been a fantastic journey and I'm excited to see it play out!Ìý
What is one piece of advice/best practice that has stuck with you throughout your career? Someone once told me to seek out the tasks and projects nobody wants to do and get good at them. I discovered that this not only makes one indispensable to an organization, but it also creates numerous unpredictable opportunities that surface from the work.
July 2019