The Seeds

Gina Foote is the Director of Fund Development at Conservation Law Foundation Ventures, where she helps cultivate market-based solutions to environmental issues. Gina is an impact investing and finance expert and applies her banking and venture investing experience to social issues. She has woven a fascinating career in international economic development and finance, working in China, Latin America, and the US, serving as COO for a private equity fund investing in clean energy and materials, the CFO for an international education company, a consultant for the financial inclusion-focused Accion International, and a professor of Finance and Business History at Boston University. In this episode Gina shares helpful insights on non-linear career trajectories. Take a listen to learn more about impact investing, environmental issues, and working abroad.

Redstone Strategy Group is a boutique consulting firm that helps leading philanthropies, non-profits, and governments solve the world's most urgent social problems. Redstone works in a variety of sectors including education, global development, emerging philanthropy, energy and climate, and the environment, but today's episode focuses on one specific project. Listen to Sam Greenberg explain how they facilitated a collaboration of New York City's top food assistance providers to get more food more efficiently to where it is needed most.

This episode is a little different. Rather than doing an interview with one person, I recorded an a panel discussion held at the Delphi Academy for European Studies in Greece. This was a two-week seminar program on Climate Change and the Environmental Humanities I attended in 2019. In this excerpt, we hear from three distinguished professors sharing their different disciplinary perspectives. We have John Barry from Queen's University in Belfast, Northern Ireland; Professor of Green Political Economy at the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics., James Engell from Harvard University; Professor of English Comparative Literature, and Verena Conley also from Harvard University; Professor of Comparative Literature and of Romance Languages and Literatures.

Cool Crop is a start-up in India with a mission to improve small and marginal farmer livelihoods and reduce food waste.

In India, there are 240 million farmers, and 3 out of every 4 of them are classified as small and marginal farmers who plant an area roughly the size of a soccer field. The harvested produce waste of these farms can be up to 60% due to lack of proper preservation facilities.

Cool Crop's on-farm cold storage technology can reduce crop wastage from 20% to less than 5%, extend produce life up to 6 times, and allow farmers to sell their produce later when the prices can go up to 10 times higher.

After meeting Niraj Marathe in Bangalore, I had the great opportunity to then record an interview with his co-founder Kendall Nowocin back in Boston!

John Barry is a Professor at Queen's University Belfast in Northern Ireland, an author, and a former politician in Ireland's Green Party. On this episode, we discuss the age of the Anthropocene, a term used to describe the geological epoch in which humans have become the major force determining the continuing livability of the Earth, whether a free market economy can achieve environmental goals, and how human development and poverty alleviation are connected to decarbonization and combatting climate breakdown.

Barry also speaks to the importance of governance and a radical shift away from a consumerist capital culture driven by a carbon economy, which is also the subject of his book. Although I am clearly a proponent of sustainable technology and innovation, this conversation made it very clear to me that along with general greening, we need to change our ideas, especially in the United States, around what progress, development, and the "good life," mean.

Book recommendations:

The Politics of Actually Existing Unsustainably: Human Flourishing in a Climate-Changed, Carbon-Constrained World, John Barry

Hope for the Hopeless, Vaclav Havel

#Green political theory

#Political economy of sustainability

#Environmental and sustainable developmental politics

#Environmental ethics

#Transition to a low-carbon/renewable energy economy

Eleanor Joseph has woven an impressive career through the domestic and international healthcare, fin-tech, and transportation industries. She currently serves as the Director of Business Development at Via, the leading developer of on-demand transit systems. She previously founded Ubuntu Capital, a company assisting small businesses and their customers within urban, emerging markets. On this episode you'll get a comprehensive understanding of Via, why it is different from sharing services, and how it is working to transform the public transportation industry today.

We'll also hear Eleanor's inside perspectives on the challenges of starting her own company, what trust looks like in today's economy, and how working in the social impact industry has made her earlier dreams for the world a tad more realistic.

Sarah Kearney is the founder of PRIME Coalition, a Cambridge-based 501c3 public charity working to combat climate change. PRIME partners with philanthropists to place charitable dollars into market-based solutions for reducing carbon emissions. They fund start-ups offering innovative technologies in this space, but are different from impact investing and traditional Venture capital in a few critical ways. Kearney is a visionary and an optimist for the climate cause - building PRIME out of her MIT graduate dissertation when she was only 26 years old. Listen to learn about impact investing, philanthropic capital, and innovation tackling climate change.

Silvia de Vaan is the founder of SweepSmart, a Dutch-Indian start-up offering a better way to sort and dispose of trash. SweepSmart's waste management model works to create smaller landfills but also jobs to be proud of. We discuss the challenges and opportunities of working in cross-cultural contexts as well as when to know it's time to start your own company. (Hint – you will never feel ready!) Silvia has a background in systems engineering and management consulting in the Netherlands and East Africa.

Amrita Vir helps us untangle the complicated web of finance – across the dimensions of inclusion, development, access, scoring, and health reform. Our conversation spans the micro-macro and international-domestic spheres as she shares on her experiences creating her own micro-finance start-up and working for the fin-tech social enterprise, Cignifi, using big data to help underserved people lacking credit histories get access to banking tools. Currently finishing up her business and policy degrees at Harvard, Amrita's next big challenge is to understand how to realign incentives for financial institutions in order to promote financial health in the United States.

Her book/podcast recommendations included:

Winner Takes All by Anand Giridharadas

Debt by David Graeber

Podcast: Women at Work – Harvard Business Review

Parker Hughes founded BRÜZD, a start-up company tackling food waste. Their twist on the farm-to-table model rescues "ugly" or surplus fruits and veggies and delivers them directly to the doorstep of subscribers in Boston and Cambridge for less than retail price. Their innovative model invites consumers to connect with their food and support local farmers in a meaningful way. Since its founding in 2017, BRUZD has been winning competition after competition and scaling rapidly. This is not beginners' luck anymore, BRUZD is the real thing! Listen to find out how they got to where they are today and where they're going next.