RONDA RUTLEDGE Executive Director, Ecotrust Rutledge, a 25-year nonprofit veteran whose prior experience includes leadership roles with the Sustainable Food Center in Austin and the American Indian Child Resource Center, stepped into her role as executive director of Ecotrust in 2023. Ecotrust was founded in 1991 to create “durable change” and spark ideas across the globe, but also maintains a focus on the West Coast region, including Alaska. Its programming includes tribal land and water stewardship, community resource programs and food-systems work — like hosting a farm-to-school and farm-to early-care-and-education institute earlier this year. “Really, what we’re trying to do is to help build power for frontline communities that are primarily folks of color, that are the first and worst affected by climate change,” Rutledge says. “The idea is that when you look at that intersection of equity, environment and economy, it’s going to take movement at that intersection for real sustainability to happen. We consider sustainability as lasting, right? So we want to make sure that these communities that are the hardest hit by what’s happening environmentally are able to resource what needs to be resourced.” So being able to thread the needle between economy, environment and equity is “pivotal,” Rutledge says. “We’ve seen the successful development of a sawmill with the San Carlos Apache and a community clinic that was developed that really focuses on farm workers in California, and then a wastewater-treatment plant on the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indians reservation — areas where, again, we may need to bring our resources to bear,” Rutlege adds. “But the thing that really sets us apart in our programming is that what we’re doing is what the community needs. And some of those needs are shifting right now, given the current climate. So there may be things that our community partners needed last year that are different this year, and we’ll need to pivot our own programming in order to address those needs, because we really take our cues from the inherent leadership that already exist in the communities that we walk alongside.” Ecotrust has not been immune to changes at the federal level. The organization is, for example, part of a collaborative called the Partnership for Climate Smart Communities, which receives federal funding. “What’s happened at the federal level is that not only are they changing the name of that particular effort, but they’re wanting the resources to be handled differently, so there’s a higher threshold for how much money is actually going directly to producers and farmers through that grant. What we’re doing is kind of talking with our program partners, as we make our own adjustments to that budget per the requirement of the federal government,” Rutledge says. That shift is still being discussed actively, but overall, Rutledge says, the changes Ecotrust is making are “not devastating.” “We’re going to weather this. We’ve had many of these programs across multiple administrations, and so I’m not super concerned about that at this point,” Rutledge says. DYLAN KRUSE President, Sustainable Northwest When Dylan Kruse graduated from Lewis and Clark College in 2009, he had a hard time finding work in his intended field, but when he found out a local environmental nonprofit was looking for interns, his interest was piqued. “I had a degree in international affairs but ended up doing something that was extremely local and domestic, working in the Pacific Northwest on rural natural- resource management,” Kruse says. “But I had, I think, a pretty strong interest in a lot of the cross-cutting issues related to natural resources — conflict, policy, economics.” Last fall Kruse became the president of Sustainable Northwest, a conservation nonprofit that “works on fixing some of our toughest natural-resource problems without sacrificing the bottom line.” The organization places a strong emphasis on forest management, green building, regenerative beef ranching and renewable-energy development as well as water management. Kruse says he sees a shift in the way we talk about sustainability — but also some core ideas that haven’t changed, at least for his organization. “We are seeing that shift and that change, but in a lot of ways, it’s what we’ve always done at Sustainable Northwest and is consistent with our mission, and it’s validated a lot of that approach,” Kruse says. “It’s this idea of, for something to be considered sustainable and to achieve these outcomes, it’s got to work for businesses. It’s got to work for producers. It’s got to work for consumers.” For example, while consumers often have strong environmental values, they still care about price point, especially with spiraling inflation. And an increasingly polarized political environment means there’s more emphasis on practical questions. “It’s just placing more of that emphasis and that pressure on, can it work? Can it work for the bottom line? Can it work for businesses? And can you have both? And we would argue that you can, and that’s what we’ve always been about — that collaboration, that partnership with landowners, with farmers, with ranchers, with businesses, to say that you can do these things. We believe that you can have a higher bar. We believe there can be strong scientific integrity behind it, but most important, can we prove it out, and can we make it pencil? “The work we do is nonpartisan,” Kruse adds. “It’s not even bipartisan. It’s nonpartisan. People want healthy food, they want clean water, they want affordable energy, they care about where products come from. They care about the communities. And so regardless of those changes we’ve seen economically and politically, these are things that people want and services that they’re going to expect. It’s our job to say, can we deliver it with that extra degree of integrity behind it? But I just think that that emphasis on the business relationships and the partnerships have to become more pronounced and essential than ever.” 31
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTcxMjMwNg==