Cultivate: Personal sustainability for professional growth

Discover what motivates you and how aligning with your personal values shapes which actions work best for you. Dive into what sustainability means, how it builds personal resilience, and how it supports climate mitigation. Learn about adopting a growth mindset, an attitude of stubborn optimism, and sustainability behavior changes that last. Learn how to overcome mental barriers holding you back from living sustainably.

Featured speaker:​

Helen Colby is an assistant professor of marketing at the Indiana University Kelley School of Business Indianapolis. Her research and writing focus on the topics of behavior change and adherence in consumer health, financial, and sustainability contexts. Her work has been published in premier journals such as Psychological Science, Judgment and Decision Making, and Science, and at academic conferences including the Association for Consumer Research Annual Conference and the Conference on Consumer Financial Decision Making. Her co-authored projects have received over a million dollars in grants from institutions such as the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. She also provides her marketing expertise to companies ranging from small startups to $1.5B companies. Colby received her PhD in cognitive psychology and marketing from Rutgers University.

Transportation is one of the largest climate impact categories in our lives. This is an exciting topic area that is evolving quickly. Learn about emerging mobility and clean modes of transport, what Mobility as a Service (MaaS) is, and how micromobility may be our future. Explore measures that relate to your own life.

We all need energy to heat our homes and live our lives, but in this rapidly growing world, how can we minimize the carbon emissions caused by this necessary resource? You’ll learn how to differentiate between energy conservation and optimization, learn how to reduce your own consumption of energy, and build resilience to the extreme weather impacts and attendant challenges we already face. Learn what is possible around clean energy systems.

Featured speaker:

Kelly Carmichael is the former vice president of Environmental Policy and Sustainability at NiSource, a public utility company serving nearly 4 million natural gas and electricity customers in six states. At the height of his two-decade career at NiSource, Carmichael oversaw environmental policy, permitting, compliance and sustainability functions, leading the company to establish a nationally recognized sustainability program, including targets to reduce the company’s greenhouse gas emissions 50 percent by 2025 and 90 percent by 2030. Recently retired, Carmichael now serves as board secretary of The Nature Conservancy in Indiana, president of the Shirley Heinze Land Trust, and member of the Indiana Environmental Rules Board.

Food is integral to our lives, health, and happiness. It is also a critical pathway for successfully mitigating climate change. We’ll explore the different areas around food waste, consumption and our diet, and ways each of us can take actions that have little to no cost associated with them. Learn how simply a sustainable food mindset can be practiced at home and scaled to all types of businesses and organizations.

Featured speaker:

Jackie Suggitt, the vice president of Business Initiatives & Community Engagement at ReFED, has spent over 10 years working in sustainable food systems. She oversees ReFED’s work with food businesses, including both one-on-one strategic advisory support, as well as the U.S. Food Waste Pact and Pacific Coast Food Waste Commitment—the nation’s first data-driven and action-oriented pre-competitive platforms for private and public sectors to collaborate on food waste reduction efforts. Jackie also leads ReFED’s Community Engagement efforts to build the organization’s diverse stakeholder network across businesses, investors, innovators, policymakers, and more. This includes overseeing ReFED’s Food Waste Action Network and the annual Food Waste Solutions Summit. Before joining ReFED, Jackie worked on Walmart’s Sustainability team, where she led a number of sustainable food and nutrition programs for Walmart’s global and private brand business.

This module covers all of the items in our lives that we buy, consume, and ultimately throw away. We will take a deep dive into the world of clothing, fashion, and textiles. You will learn about chemical recycling, repurposing of textiles, and how our consumer-primed mind needs to be transformed into a sustainability-focused mindset.

Featured speaker:

Mary Embry is a senior lecturer of merchandising at the Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design at Indiana University Bloomington, focusing on sustainability, product development and the materials supply chain. Embry lectures on sustainability in the fashion industry and is a recognized practitioner of high-impact learning, having won a Trustees Teaching Award in 2016. Embry is also a fair trade activist. In the summer of 2016, she led a group of IU students and Bloomington community members interested in fair trade to Guatemala.

In this module, we’ll investigate the trash in our lives and how we can value our waste. We will go beyond the 4Rs (refuse, reuse, reduce, recycle) and learn how the world is moving towards circular flows of valuable materials. You will get a taste of how to progress towards a zero-waste lifestyle. And we’ll focus on two waste areas of grave concern, plastic pollution and electronic waste, and how to reduce their negative impact in our lives and on the planet.

Featured speaker:

Meredith Soward is a Global Plastic Policy Specialist at World Wildlife Fund (WWF). She specializes in designing and executing high-level multi-stakeholder convenings, including the WWF Plastic Policy Summit, global events during the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC) meetings to negotiate a global plastics treaty, and the launch of the Business Coalition for a Global Plastics Treaty. Soward also develops WWF’s plastic policy positions on reuse, health, and environmental justice, and participates in the WWF delegation advocating for a global plastics treaty. Prior to WWF, she worked at Meridian Institute, where she designed and co-facilitated national and international dialogues to increase support for a global treaty on plastic waste, increased alignment on state Extended Producer Responsibility policy, and developed strategies to improve coastal resilience. Previously, Soward worked at the intersection of human rights and sustainability across a variety of issues.

Water is life and essential to our survival. You will learn how climate change has dramatically impacted the quality and quantity of our planet’s most precious natural resource. We will critically review your usage of water and the sustainability measures that can dramatically impact your water footprint. You will learn about greywater reuse and meaningful ways to conserve potable water.

Whether you live in a large house, a tiny home, or an apartment, there are many ways large and small to reduce the negative impacts of your dwelling on climate change. You will learn to explain the difference between deconstruction and demolition and the value of each. Get inspired about how to move your home towards net zero carbon or simply a lower carbon emissions footprint.

Featured speaker:​​

Thomas Landis is a senior lecturer in the Communication, Professional & Computer Skills department at the Kelley School of Business. Landis is an accomplished real estate investor and developer focused on creating a portfolio of rental properties that are local and affordable, embrace regenerative design, foster community, and build capital. He also teaches courses on urban chicken keeping, and on sustainability and the US housing crisis. Landis has an MA in Professional Communication Studies from Purdue University.

Beyond our homes, the green spaces that surround and comfort us are vital to our health and happiness. In this module, we focus on food resilience, regenerative agriculture, and edible landscapes. Learn what you can do with a garden, balcony, or even a spare strip of grass by the curb.

Featured speaker:

Sarah Mincey is a social-ecological systems scientist who studies natural resource management with particular emphasis on urban forest management. She serves as faculty in the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs and as managing director for the Environmental Resilience Institute (ERI) at Indiana University. Mincey is a co-founder and member of the executive committee of the Indiana Community Forestry Council, advising the Community and Urban Forestry Program within the state’s Department of Natural Resources. She is also co-founder and vice president for CanopyBloomington, a nonprofit focused on equitably growing the urban forest in Bloomington. Mincey earned her PhD and MPA/MSES from Indiana University.

This is your lodestar moment—you are now equipped with the level of knowledge and understanding about climate change, consumerism, and your own individual impacts to make meaningful strides in your life around sustainability. In this final module, we remind ourselves that collective action and policy change are just as crucial as individual action for transitioning to a sustainable future that is accessible for all. We’ll look at how climate change, human rights, and sustainability are intimately intertwined.

Featured speaker:

Kelly Bousman is the senior vice president of Marketing and ESG at AVI-SPL, a global collaboration technology company with 4,000+ employees and 65 offices worldwide. Bousman has spearheaded AVI-SPL’s sustainability journey by creating its multi-year ESG roadmap, managing cross-functional teams to develop and deliver on initiatives, overseeing data collection to drive executive alignment, and managing standardized reporting and disclosure processes. She is currently working on setting science-based targets (SBTs) for the company.