
Webinars
Upcoming Webinars
Sustainability Inspired Successes: A National Webinar Series
NSS's webinar series highlighting member-driven science and action.

From Ideas to Impact: A Playbook for Making a Difference in a Fragmented World
April 13th 9am PT / 12pm ET
Michael Sheldrick
Michael Sheldrick is a policy entrepreneur, author and a driving force behind the efforts of Global Citizen to end extreme poverty and build climate resilience. As a Co-Founder and Chief Policy, Impact, and Government Affairs Officer, he has mobilized over $43 billion in support for healthcare, education and climate from governments, businesses, and foundations. Michael is an Adjunct Associate Professor at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs, and the author of the Amazon best-selling book, From Ideas to Impact: A Playbook for Influencing and Implementing Change in a Divided World (Wiley: 2024; paperback edition released November 2025).

Title Forthcoming
May 18th 9am PT / 12pm ET
Andreas Rasche, Professor and Associate Dean, Copenhagen Business School. Professor Rasche's research focuses on corporate sustainability regulations and how to integrate ESG issues into boardrooms. His recent book, The Ethics of ESG: Critically Assessing the Environmental, Social and Governance Movement, addresses moral, political, and legal questions about the legitimacy of ESG as a management and investment strategy. Professor Rasche is a frequent speaker and a prolific writer.

A Climate Career from Campus to Capital
Webinar 7 - July 16th 9am PT / 12pm ET
Chris Castro is Founding Director and EVP, Chief Sustainability Officer at Climate First Bank., Chris previously served as a presidential appointee for the Biden-Harris Administration, where he managed a $16 billion portfolio of grants and technical assistance programs at the U.S. Department of Energy. Chris's career also includes nearly a decade of service at the City of Orlando, advancing the City's sustainability and climate action goals through the Green Works Orlando initiative. He co-founded IDEAS For Us, a global UN-accredited nonprofit advancing community-led sustainability projects; started Citizen Energy, a clean-energy consulting firm specializing in commercial and multifamily buildings; and co-created Fleet Farming, an urban farming social enterprise transforming underutilized land into edible landscapes throughout Central Florida.
Past Webinars

SIS Series:
Joint Environmental and Social Benefits from Diversified Agriculture
Webinar 4 - Feb 26th 9am PT / 12pm ET
Dr. Laura Vang Rasmussen (University of Copenhagen), the lead author of the 2025 Frontiers Planet Prize international champion article.
Agricultural simplification, particularly in the form of intensive monocultures, is expanding and threatening our environment. Dr. Rasmussen and colleagues gathered evidence from 2,655 farms across 11 countries to show that combining multiple agricultural diversification strategies, such as cultivating multiple crops or embedding nature on farms, delivers greater social and environmental benefits than single practices alone. These findings highlight the need for policies that support the adoption of multiple diversification strategies in unison.

SIS Series:
Addressing "hard-to-recycle" Beauty Products
Webinar 3 - Nov 10th 9am PT / 12pm ET
Mia Davis, Pact Co-founder
People are surprised to learn that many of the things they put into their curbside recycling bin are not actually recycled. An estimated 120 billion beauty packages are made each year — most of them from virgin plastic, and most of them ending up in the landfill. Pact is a collective of beauty industry stakeholders taking responsibility for the impacts of our packaging. The nonprofit membership organization sends "hard-to-recycle" beauty products to specialty recyclers to prevent the materials from becoming trash.
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SIS Series:
The tech-enabled solution for keeping retail excess from the landfill
Webinar 2 - Oct 8th 9am PT / 12pm ET
Disney Petit is a social impact entrepreneur and environmental activist. She is the Founder and CEO of LiquiDonate, a software that integrates seamlessly with any WMS or RMS to automatically match unsellable returns and overstock inventory with nonprofits, reducing waste, supporting communities, and providing businesses with a sustainable and cost-effective alternative to disposal.

SIS Series:
Planetary health innovations for disease, agriculture, water, energy, sustainability, and poverty challenges in Africa
Webinar 1 - July 17th 9am PT / 12pm ET
Jason Rohr, Galla Professor and Chair of the Department of Biological Sciences. University of Notre Dame, and 2024 International Champion, Frontiers Planet Prize
Dr Rohr shared how their team developed a “win-win” innovation that reduces the neglected tropical disease schistosomiasis while improving agriculture, energy access, and water availability. A randomized controlled trial showed that removing invasive aquatic vegetation lowers infection rates and increases open water access without harming ecosystems. Their team repurposed the vegetation into valuable agricultural inputs and used remote sensing to enable scalable, targeted implementation—offering a sustainable solution that links human health, food security, and environmental resilience.
Sustainability Visioning and Scoping: A National Webinar Series
“Multi-sectoral, Collaborative Approaches to Addressing the Sustainability Challenge”
Sustainability is a framework for understanding the economic, environmental, social, and technological effects of human activity and for addressing complex challenges created by these effects in ways that are equitable to current and future generations. Human activities relevant for sustainability range in scale from the individual to the organizational to all of society actions in the sectors of academia, civil society, government and private enterprise. The effects of these actions may be beneficial to some, but have associated costs and risks that are distributed unevenly and out of proportion to their benefits across different populations today and in the future. Addressing these effects, which include climate change, loss of biodiversity, food, energy, and water insecurity, is the sustainability challenge. Effective action requires a shared understanding of the root causes and sustained, coordinated effort between all affected and interested parties. Such effort must begin with a shared vision of the sustainability challenge and the scope of action necessary to address it.
The Sustainability Visioning and Scoping Webinar Series provides a forum for all parties to share their interests, concerns, insights, and approaches to the sustainability challenge

Innovation for
Sustainability
Webinar 3 - September 11, 2024
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Michael Hammett, Chief Innovation Officer, City of Phoenix
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Mary Nichols, Former Chair of the California Air Resources Board
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Jerald "Chico" Hunter, Manager of Innovation and Development, SRP Water & Power
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Matt Petersen, President and CEO, Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator (LACI)
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Eusebio Scornavacca, Director, School of the Future of Innovation in Society, Arizona State University
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Diane Pataki, Cassie Rauser (Arizona State University, UCLA– facilitators)

Implementing
Sustainability Goals
Webinar 2 - August 14, 2024
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Bruno Sarda, Professor of Practice, Arizona State University
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Sasha Calder, Head of Impact, Geno, The Sustainable Source
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Nancy Sutley, Deputy Mayor for Energy and Sustainability, City of Los Angeles
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Charlie Donovan Visiting Professor of Finance and Business Economics, University of Washington
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Bonnie Nixon, Director of Sustainability, Long Beach Container Terminal
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Arun Agrawal, Dan Brown (University of Michigan, University of Washington– facilitators)

Sustainability Workforce Development
Webinar 1 - July 17, 2024
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Peggy Brannigan (Director, Global Environmental Sustainability, LinkedIn)
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Christopher Frey (Asst. Administrator of the Office of Research and Development, EPA)
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Amy Luers (Global Director, Sustainability Science, Microsoft)
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Marco Ugarte (Director, Sustainability, Walmart)
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Chris Boone, Ryan Johnson (Arizona State University– facilitators)

Effective partnerships for NGOs and universities
April 19, 2024
This webinar engages NGO and university leaders to discuss how effective partnerships can meet mutual knowledge, action, and educational needs.
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Bemmy Granados, Director of Innovation in Landscape Management, EcoAgriculture Partners
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Angela Bednarek, Director, Evidence Project, Pew Charitable Trusts
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Lucy Fernandez, Manager, Solutions Design and Delivery, Jobs for the Future
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J.T. Erbaugh, Quantitative Social Scientist, Global Science, The Nature Conservancy
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Sara Vander Zanden, Senior Manager, Jobs for the Future
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Moderators: Nicole Ardoin (Stanford University), Chris Boone (ASU), and Cassie Rauser (CIV:LAB and MorphoStrategies)
