Sense of Urgency and Agency- Social and Environmental Transformation
On April 18, 2019, INFEWS students had the pleasure of engaging with Bonnie Nixon during our Brown Bag seminar. Nixon has worked as a sustainability executive, environmental and human rights supply chain consultant, and university educator. She is a self-proclaimed “relentless optimist”, and, in addition to her degrees in Sociology and Learning Technologies, is currently working towards a PhD in Global Leadership and Change. At the seminar, Nixon spoke about her past roles at companies like Hewlett-Packard and Walmart, emphasizing how human rights is woven into conscious business models and sustainability. In particular, she expressed how she focuses on understanding why business, and the individuals in them, may practice discriminatory processes and then, through this empathy, offers new, more humane practices that they can implement instead. She ties these humane practices into environmental sustainability because, paraphrasing her own words, it is difficult to get people to care about their impact on the environment if they first don’t care about other people. Wise words for INFEWS trainees to mull over! The trainees are very grateful for her visit and hope to follow in her path of positive environmental transformation.