Michelle Stearn

Senior Sustainability Strategist

Background

I was born and raised in Chicago, and studied Culture & Politics and Environmental Policy at Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Washington, D.C. Throughout my career I’ve worked at the nexus of regenerative energy and youth development to innovate and elevate solutions for people + planet. I started off mapping sustainable agriculture initiatives in Chicago, and through this endeavor became entrenched in community urban agriculture and biofuel production via waste vegetable oil. I went on to establish a biofuel laboratory in D.C. where I was studying, exploring and implementing waste-to-energy solutions in partnership with a Chicago-based nonprofit.

My passion for working on community-led regenerative energy programs led me to pursue a Fulbright Interdisciplinary Research project in Chile, where I worked to map and make linkages among the grassroots small scale projects and their institutional counterparts—public-private initiatives in renewable energy from non-virgin feedstocks. Along the way I have worked on media + communications at The Democracy Collaborative, a think tank helping envision and implement the next economic system, as well as a foray into solving education inequalities in my city through corporate career mentorship programs.

Dream project

I jump up and down about making connections across disciplines and seemingly disparate areas, data visualization with an equity lens, and crowdsourced mapping, and I am a multimedia storyteller at heart. I would love to combine these elements on a project to bridge the gaps between small-scale regenerative energy work and the innovators and investors in the corporate landscape, with a vision of making renewables accessible on the path towards a just and equitable energy transition.

What floats my boat outside work

I love designing and facilitating workshops that get folks (especially youth!) thinking big about what the future of energy looks like. A particular favorite is using biomimicry as a means to imagine new systems and institutions that can solve big programs. I also enjoy cooking, getting my hands dirty in the garden, listening to and playing music, biking, and running around with my dog Storm.

Contact Michelle

Latest

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The women of Madre Tierra are fighting for farmworker justice. Here’s how.

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The Five Capitals - a framework for sustainability

The Five Capitals Model provides a basis for understanding sustainability in terms of the economic concept of wealth creation or ‘capital’. Any organisation will use five types of capital to deliver its products or services. A sustainable organisation will maintain and where possible enhance these stocks of capital assets, rather than deplete or degrade them.
Jobs

We are a growing organisation and we are regularly on the look out for new recruits to join our teams around the world.
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Forum for the Future is a leading international sustainability organisation running out of offices in the UK, US, India and Singapore.
Growing our Future US

Working together to accelerate the transition to a just and regenerative agriculture system in the United States.
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Climate change, malnutrition, inequality, poverty, ecological degradation. The global challenges we face are so urgent and tricky that we need a solution to match their scale and complexity. This is where system change comes in. We use systems thinking to understand the web of interrelations that create complex problems, anticipate unintended consequences, and identify how and where to take action to meet the SDG goals.
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