Gwen Larned

I would start with my mom. I was raised by a very strong, opinionated woman, and I feel like that's something that I have that not a lot of other people, especially at my age, have. I just turned 29, and my managers always know that they can count on me to say what I'm thinking, whereas sometimes other people are a little more hesitant to share their opinion. I've also had a lot of great mentors throughout my career. Really everywhere that I've worked, I've been very lucky with the managers that I've had. I also think just having the confidence to choose a career based on passion has been a good strength of mine, and being really committed to staying in the industry, even when it was challenging.

When I did my corporate internship in college, I was working at the headquarters for an apparel company, and the VP of sustainability that I worked under told me in a one-to-one meeting that it wasn't my responsibility to get other people to want to change, but to help people who were ready to change figure out what to do. I think about that a lot, because in the sustainability space, we worry about people who aren't on board yet and feel a little pessimistic about the fact that there's a lot of people who just don't care. But ultimately, there's actually a lot of people who do care, they just don't know what to do. That helps you make a lot more progress when you focus on who's ready to change instead of trying to change people.

I think sustainability is hard because there's a lot of people who want to work in the industry, but there are not that many good-paying jobs. Especially when you're entering into the field, it can be challenging to find good roles. For me, I felt a bit let down upon graduating, because I had a lot of really exciting internships and stuff like that, but ultimately, I actually ended up moving home and working at a small local nonprofit for like 9 months before finding the next good job. My main advice is just be okay with having an unconventional career path. Just stay engaged and keep looking for opportunities, but also reach out to other women in the industry. I love it when people message me on LinkedIn, and I'm always open to taking like a 30-minute call and talking to people about my experience and helping them to find their footing. I've been helped a lot by other women bringing me to jobs, and I think that would be my advice.

Funding is, of course, a challenge in sustainability, as it probably is in all industries. Federal policies that drive a lot of the change happening can change drastically based on different administrations, so that can be difficult. In general, environmental policy, although we have major environmental policies at a federal level, most of the work being done is state by state, or even city by city, and I think that is both the biggest challenge and the biggest opportunity. Standardizing environmental regulations across states would have massive impact, and I think that's hopefully where we're going in the future. That's why I wanted to move to California upon graduating from college, because California really drives a lot of the environmental policy, not just in the U.S., but for the world, because it's like the fifth largest economy by itself. When California sets environmental laws, it can really shift the economy globally, which I think is really cool.

I would say integrity. Living in alignment with your values is really important. When I was in university, I was running the zero-waste program for our campus, but I also lived zero-waste, meaning that I tried not to use any single-use plastics or create landfill waste. By being able to demonstrate, not just through my words and what I thought that my campus should do, but also through my individual actions every day, I think that really helped me to be a leader in sustainability on my campus. It gave people proof and really demonstrated that the solutions that I was proposing on a larger scale, I really believed in, because I was doing it on a smaller scale. I'm also very justice-oriented. I do a lot of work in advocating for local policy and working with local political groups. In sustainability, we tend to focus a lot on the environmental aspect, and not that much on the social equity and human health impacts that environmental issues have. That's what really drives my work.