—Systemic change begins with personal change—
Anisa Heming is director of the Center for Green Schools at the U.S. Green Building Council. In 2014, she was named one of the Most Powerful Women in Sustainability by Green Building and Design Magazine. With a background in architecture, she began her work with USGBC in New Orleans, hired to assist with rebuilding the schools after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
After two years with the city’s Recovery School District, she moved to Washington, DC to begin the Green Schools Fellowship Program at the Center for Green Schools, a program that places and trains sustainability directors in school districts. As director, Anisa provides strategic direction to USGBC’s work in schools and coordinates an organization-wide team to promote environmental sustainability, health and wellness, and sustainability literacy in school systems around the world. She is a Little Rock native and holds a B.S. in Architecture from Washington University in St. Louis and an M.Arch. from the University of Washington in Seattle.
In 2008, she was hired by USGBC as their New Orleans Green Building Coordinator and given a computer, a phone and a broad assignment: keep the school district on track to rebuild LEED Certified schools and do what else might be necessary to support community-based greening efforts on the ground. The U.S. Green Building Council had created this support position in response to citizen action after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
When she left two years later, the school district had four LEED Certified schools and over 30 schools in the registration process, eight LEED Green Associates and two LEED APs on school project management staff, an indoor air quality manager in place, a district recycling program, and a green school curriculum resource in circulation. Her work in New Orleans has shaped everything else she does with schools and school districts. She saw how schools communicate to children and tell them what value we collectively put on them and their future.
This episode contains a lot of laughter. It's about making behaviors conscious. Many people tell me how hard they envision living by their values. They think you have to prepare with planning, analysis, and so on. Anisa's experience suggests the opposite: starting and acting leads you to figure things out. As she points out, if you try to solve everything, you'll never start. If you start, you'll find you can solve more and more things. Hear from Anisa how much easier changing is when you just start. Read the transcript.
Anisa is another counterexample to believing that working on the environment distracts from getting ahead. She rose to become the director of the Center for Green Schools at the U.S. Green Building Council despite being early in her career. Though she was doing fine in architecture, she responded to the call for help people and communities in New Orleans after hurricanes Rita and Katrina. Doing what people cared about helped others and led her to positions to help more people, leading her to Washington, DC and being named one of the Most Powerful Women in Sustainability. Still friendly and humble, she shared her environmental values, including where she felt she wasn't living up to them---what many people hide. Then she chose to act on them, recognizing the difficulty. I see her as a role model for improving one's leadership through self-awareness and action. Read the transcript.