From Social Service to Corporate Sustainability
Snapshot
Hometown
Current Location:
Current Title:
Previous:
FILLER
Chicago, IL
Seattle, WA
Senior Lead, ESG Reporting Strategy, Amazon
Sustainability MBA Associate, Johnson & Johnson
Social Enterprise Manager, The Chicago Lighthouse
Resident in Social Enterprise, AmeriCorps
From direct service to corporate sustainability
I always knew that my career would focus on impact. I grew up believing that it was my responsibility to leave the world a better place than I found it, and I wanted my career to focus on fulfilling that purpose. Before Fuqua, I spent one year as an AmeriCorps fellow, helping transform a community gardening initiative into a social enterprise that could deliver healthy food to low-income communities. After that, I joined a social service agency that leveraged a social enterprise model to create job opportunities for people with disabilities.
After working in a direct service capacity for a few years, I wanted to transition into corporate sustainability, which is why I pursued business school. My interest in social enterprise and sustainability stemmed from the same core belief: that the economy is fundamentally integrated with society and the environment, and that all three pillars can exist in mutually beneficial ways.
Accepting my MBA internship was an inflection point early in my journey at Fuqua. I landed a sustainability internship at Johnson & Johnson shortly into my first year, and it was exactly the type of role I had intended to pursue after business school. That internship solidified my ambition to work in corporate sustainability. After graduating, I joined Amazon to help launch the company’s first sustainability report. Nearly six years later, I sit on the same team (which makes me somewhat unusual at Amazon) and still focus on reporting strategy.
How I spend my days in my current role
In my current role, I spend most of my time engaging with stakeholders across Amazon who work on different aspects of sustainability. Amazon is a big place and a lot of what I do feels like strengthening our sustainability muscle across the company. My day-to-day activities range from developing insights and sharing guidance, to helping shape and advance business strategies, to collecting information about initiatives that are happening across the company so we can share our sustainability progress publicly.
A recent impact highlight I am proud of
I was part of the team that published Amazon’s first sustainability report and launched The Climate Pledge, just three months into joining the company. The ripple effects of those two initiatives have had an enormous collective impact, both on Amazon and on hundreds of other companies that have joined The Pledge. I’ve watched how sustainability reporting fundamentally changes a business from the inside out and I’m proud to be part of that flywheel of impact at a place like Amazon.
A mindset that helps in my role
An impact career demands that you have resilience and grit. It’s never going to be about one big launch or one major success. In fact, the big launch is generally just the beginning. Impact leaders must have the stamina and resilience to travel a long distance—one foot in front of the other, even if you have to take baby steps, or take a few steps back to eventually move forward. I’ve found that by widely applying that sentiment across the various parts of my life—from parenting, to relationships, to finances—I’ve become more resilient at work and bring more energy to my role.
A valuable piece of advice I was given about working in impact
Like any career path, impact careers are a combination of focus and function. The focus piece tends to be easier for those of us in the impact space to identify because we are inherently drawn to certain issues or causes. But settling on a function that aligns with your skills and talents is equally—if not more—important. It’s hard to enjoy your work if you don’t enjoy your day-to-day tasks. For those seeking an impact career, don’t forget about the function part of the equation!
How Fuqua contributed to my impact journey
Fuqua gave me the foundational business knowledge I needed to succeed in a corporate environment and lots of practice in the core parts of my day-to-day job today—from writing, to engaging with stakeholders, to presenting my ideas. It also provided unlimited opportunities to explore my interests in sustainability, social impact, leadership, and beyond. Serving as the Net Impact Club Co-President was a major highlight of my Fuqua experience that touched on all of the above and provided opportunities to exercise leadership, program development, stakeholder engagement, and organizational management. All of those skills relate directly to my current job and my planned career journey.