I'm a second year MBA student at Sloan.
I'm originally from Boston, Massachusetts.
I went to Lehigh University for undergrad
and worked in finance, which is where I first
became interested in sustainability work
at Morgan Stanley in investment management.
I became very interested in this idea of impact investing
and investors and consumers that were caring about things
in addition to profitability.
I also went to Brazil as part of the Climate Reality Leadership
Corps with Al Gore and became trained as a climate leader.
And as a climate leader, the mandate
is to provide climate awareness-raising
presentations, and so I became very interested
in the communication aspect of sustainability
and how do you speak to people who might not necessarily
agree with your beliefs.
It was a pleasant surprise coming to MIT
from Wall Street, which was a different community of people
that maybe climate change wasn't the first thing on their minds.
And I'd been so grateful to be at a place
where climate change is actually a focus
and there's scientists here and professors here and students
here that have spent years studying climate change.
I ended up sitting in on the Sustainability Initiative
class, the S-Lab, and I was just entranced
by the professors and the learnings,
and the more and more people I met,
I felt a very strong connection to the culture,
especially the sustainability folk at the school.
It's been a tremendous fit for me and--
yeah, definitely influenced the way
I think about the world, allowed me to increase my perspective,
work with people that are passionate
about similar things.
I am one of three co-founders of a nonprofit initiative called
Before It's Too Late.
We are a virtual reality exposition
for climate change story solutions and simulations.
We're partnered with multiple groups
at MIT, like the Center for Collective Intelligence,
the Media Lab, the System Dynamics Group;
and on our core team are actually classmates that are
in the virtual reality world.
While there's many climate change solutions out there--
and they're great-- the problem still feels far away
and there's a lack of urgency and accountability.
It's actually our whole concept is
based on research that was done at MIT that
shows that the link between affect and intend to act
is much stronger than the link between pure knowledge
and intent to act, and we feel that there
is an empathy gap in the climate change narrative.
We're piloting in southern Florida.
We've already been down there, met
with all the different stakeholder groups.
We met with Mayor Jim Cason from Coral Gables,
we met with the City of Miami, Miami-Dade County, Broward
County, Miami Beach, and the South Florida Compact;
and we're really excited to partner with them because
of two reasons-- one, we think the sea level problem is
imminent and there's a real story
to be told there-- that can be shown in the virtual reality;
and two, the stakeholder group there
is already collaborating together,
so it's an easier process to work with people that want
to mitigate climate change.
The first phase is content that's produced by us,
United States-focused--
Southern Florida will be the first,
but we hope to go to California and look at deforestation
and we hope to highlight different climate change
issues around the nation.
Phase two is almost like a curated YouTube for a climate
change virtual reality content, where
it's a dynamic crowdsourced tool so that people
can share their stories around-- hopefully
the world-- at some point as well as view what's going on
and really just increase awareness and encourage action.
We've always come up against this gap
in clementines advocacy that it's
purely educational and less emotional,
and we believe in the virtual reality
to really pull up that emotional piece
and that that's the missing link in actually encouraging action
to climate change.
And that once people are mostly affected from here,
they will be more encouraged to act.
I don't think there's any one thing that will save the world,
if you will.
But our project is part of the solution in both changing
mindsets and implementing policies that helped mitigate
carbon emissions.
I personally believe a carbon tax is necessary.
I think that companies and individuals and government
organizations need to be responsible
for the negative externalities they're putting forth
on the planet.
I think there's a lot of fear.
I think there's the potential for certain policies
to be enacted from the government
that halt climate change progress, but I think that--
and I hope sincerely-- that people
that are advocates for climate change
continue to push ahead, because I actually
think while there may be challenges ahead,
there is a tremendous opportunity.