Opening Our Doors
Let’s start with the big one: In January 2024, the Global Impact Collective officially launched. While of course this was a cause for celebration, it would be misleading to reduce our formation down to a single point. More than merely a launch date, January marked the culmination of months of effort, support, and dedication from not only the Collective team and our Founding Advisors, but also the strong sustainability community that pushed our consultancy from vision to reality.
“The proudest part of the year for me was not a singular moment,” says Carey Renn, Co-Founder and COO. “It was the level of commitment and faith and trust that the Collective would be something, and not just something, but something great, something that so many people were willing to take a chance on and give of themselves toward its success.”
“The concept has resonated with not just people in our networks but also with clients we’re working with and prospective clients we’ve talked to,” adds James Bernard, Co-Founder and CEO. “It’s confirmed that what we’re doing is actually really needed in the world right now.”
Our success building this network since launch is also a point of pride across the team. In September, we convened a panel of experts to discuss human-centered AI with 40+ members of the impact community in Seattle, leading to a fruitful conversation about policy, consent, and the greater landscape of technology. Many Collective members cite this event as a high point of the year. “These events plant ideas,” says project manager Saira McDonald. “People leave thinking bigger.”
Leslie Hale, a founding member of the Collective, considers bringing the panelists together her favorite moment of 2024. “These three people were from very different organizations. It was like something ignited,” she recalls. “They came into the event already having a sense of each other and really, really wanting to have a good conversation about it with other people.”
The AI event’s deep discussion of pressing issues proved emblematic of the Collective’s ability to serve as a nexus for those with like minds, diverse perspectives, and similar aims. “There’s just a tremendous amount of power when people work together toward a common goal, and the power of the people who've joined us is the reason why we’re here today,” says Carey.
A Year of Impact
2024 began and ended with conference appearances—fitting bookends to track our progress through the year. The first event took place at GreenBiz in Scottsdale, Arizona, where we hosted a three-hour workshop on human-centered design for the circular economy featuring speakers from Microsoft, WWF, Starbucks, and Levi’s. It sparked interest in our work as we built the consultancy over the next few months.
“I had people who I hadn’t seen in a while come up to me and say, ‘Oh, I want to hear more about the Global Impact Collective,’” says Judith Hochhauser Schneider, a founding member of the Collective who helped facilitate. “People knew who we were in February before we even had a client. It proved to me that human-centered design is a compelling offering for NGOs, the private sector, municipalities, governments—what we’re doing strikes a chord.”
“Global Impact Collective helped us design a one-day workshop around food waste prevention as part of our global partnership with Sodexo, and together we were able to create interactive, culturally sensitive sessions that resonated with our diverse participants from the US, UK, and France.” — Anne Garsztka, WWF |
From there, we established a diversity of partnerships across the sector, broadening the scope of both our work and its impact, from supporting eco-forward museum operations in rural Medora, North Dakota (TRPL), to monitoring maritime sustainability in the Bering Sea (MITRE). Perhaps most emblematic of the Collective's work ethos is our ongoing partnership with an anonymous large food and beverage client, which both James and Carey point to as exemplary.
“The way that we have been so agile and responsive is integral to the success of multiple initiatives that they have,” says James. “We’ve been able to pivot with them as they’ve had to pivot within their business. That’s just a sign of a trusting partnership and how we sort through things with them.”
“That’s exactly what we want. That’s how we want to show up for all clients,” Carey adds.
Judith loves the combination of hyper-local and hyper-global work the Collective takes on—and the exciting ability of one to become the other. She finds that her current work with Seattle Public Utilities, which involves conducting community research to create an effective food waste prevention campaign, is emblematic of this. “We’re talking to all these companies and nonprofit organizations that are making food systems in Seattle run. We’re getting to be part of creating something that will be big in the future within Seattle, then in the broader Seattle region, and then in the Pacific Northwest as a whole. Because of SPU and Seattle’s affiliation with other organizations doing similar work, this could have implications up and down the West Coast and beyond.”
“We’ve really enjoyed working with the Global Impact Collective. They treat the relationship as a true partnership. They come to the work with curiosity and experience. Working with their team includes the ease of a good friendship paired up with accountability and research that gives us confidence in new approaches. Their staff listens deeply to everyone involved and works efficiently to get results.” —Liz Fikejs, Seattle Public Utilities |
Proving her point, members of the Collective have traversed the world in support of our clients, from coordinating workshops with potato farmers in Brazil to interviewing growers in Spain. Even when working from Seattle or Portland, our projects have touched people around the globe. We have also welcomed other talented individuals to the Collective team, including Reena Kawal, Sarah Rogers, and Cady Susswein.
“We’ve been fortunate to find and bring in the right people to help with our projects,” says James. “They’ve taken up our mission with a passion.”
Globetrotting for Change
A Deeper Focus on Food Systems
2024 has also clarified the Collective’s focus. Between our work, the expertise of our members, and the sustainability issues facing the world at large, a compelling theme emerged: food systems.
“We feel that food systems are significant because they are central to so many of the ‘wicked’ problems facing the world,” says James. “Food systems are a lens to climate change, conservation, community development, livelihoods, and so much more.”
As Carey describes it, “It's a shift, but it’s not a change in our mission or vision so much as it’s about the focus of our mission and vision.”
Leslie sees the move as a natural evolution of the Collective’s goals. “We’re now beginning to see the fiber that holds us together, and food systems is a really great place for us to concentrate because we have a comprehension of it and it’s also a human-centered point of view for the set of problems we address.”
Saira agrees. “I think we started so high level, and finding food systems gave us the opportunity to really crystalize.”
“The Collective’s mission remains the same, which is to apply human centered design and thinking to these big problems that people around the world are facing," James adds. “It can be addressing regenerative agriculture in Washington State and food waste and loss in Seattle, or it can be helping fishers in Ghana who are trying to make financial ends meet.”
Far from restricting the Collective’s work, our new food systems focus will help us galvanize around using our expertise most effectively in 2025 and beyond. In short, as Leslie puts it, we have gained “Not just clients, but partners.”
The year closed with another conference appearance, eleven months after our GreenBiz debut. At Global Washington, the Collective partnered with PATH, a global heath NGO, to present an interactive breakout session on empathy that received glowing participant feedback and reinforced the human-centered thinking that defined us from the start.
Looking Ahead
If our first year was any indication, the Global Impact Collective’s horizons will only broaden. “We’re young, but I feel like we’ve hit a stride, and the future is easier to see because we have momentum,” says Leslie. “We’ve been very responsive and very invested in our clients in a way that makes us valuable to them.”
James adds, “We’ll be expanding the kind of impact we can have at the local, state, national, and global level by continuing to partner with the clients that we’re working with as well as other organizations who want to join in this journey of change.”
Carey sums it up nicely: “I want to keep doing what we’re doing – times ten!”
As we turn the corner into 2025, however, it’s difficult to not feel anxious or discouraged about the state of the world. Times are turbulent, perhaps more so than they’ve been in recent history. Now more than ever is the time to develop, encourage, and emphasize our tenets of empathy and human connection on both US soil and beyond.
“We’re operating with hope and optimism,” James says. “And in a cynical and fast-changing world, that can be hard to maintain. But the more people who get involved and the more change we drive, the more positive change can manifest itself, no matter what the externality is.”
To that end, the Collective will be holding many more events in the coming year. Expect to see a lot more of us, from posts on our blog to conference appearances to community engagement and prepare to get involved. On January 23, 2025, we’ll hold our next networking event and panel discussion, “Food Waste Prevention: How the Pacific Northwest is Leading the Nation.” Join us and a panel of experts to meet other impact-minded Seattleites, eat pizza, and discuss local and global approaches to food waste prevention. We’d love to see you there.
Until next time, stay kind, stay hopeful, and most of all, stay focused. The world is big, and there’s still much work to do.