Strategic consultant for mission-driven organizations
Are you working for a world that is better for people, for the climate, and for nature? Is your organization ready to scale its impact?
Innovative organizations know that they need to continually adapt. However, we can get so focused on our program of work that we can find it hard to find the time/energy/headspace to ensure that our current strategy, operations, and team are optimized and enabling us to reach our goals.
Using my two decades of experience with pioneering organizations and programs, we can work together to translate your mission into tangible strategies and tactics and ensure your organization is reaching its potential.
The urgent state of our climate and nature crises mean that all organizations need to be looking at how their work is supporting a world where people and the living world can thrive. If you are early in this journey, we can collaborate to create the buy-in, strategies, and integration into your organization.
I believe we are poised to reach for and create a world that is better than we have imagined. We have shown our resilience and ingenuity and are ready to build the future that we need.
I can share a vision for this future with your audience, and help you and your organization develop a strategy and a pragmatic path forward.
I can help you see it, feel it, and get there. A future that is climate positive, people positive, and nature positive is within our grasp.
HOW CLIMATE BECAME PERSONAL FOR ME
Like a drumbeat, the signs kept coming, one after the other. Whether I wanted to hear them or not. For a long time, I had known in my mind what could happen. But now I was feeling it in my bones.
While there was one sign that was bigger than the rest, there was a long lead up to that day. The first really big wildfires in California were in 2017. That was when my Dad and his partner had to evacuate from their home in a quiet Napa neighborhood in the middle of the night. When his partner called her niece up the hill to wake her, to tell her to get out of the house – she fled holding the hand of her young son with flames just across the street. The fire took her house that night.
At that point, I had been working in environmental and urban sustainability for 25 years and was well aware of climate change and its causes. In the summer of 2018, I took a Climate Reality training course to dig deeper. I learned about how many of the extreme weather events we had been experiencing were connected to a changing climate. How the north and south pole are warming faster than the rest of the earth, destabilizing air patterns. How the increased heat of the atmosphere evaporates more moisture out of the soil, both causing droughts and bigger wildfires in some places, and loading the air with more water for bigger rainstorms and more floods in other places. I realized that even with my very proactive effort to stay informed, I had only a glimpse of all the things that were happening every year that were pointing to how unstable the climate was becoming.
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"This wasn’t about making sure future generations would have a stable climate with abundant food and water, this was about saving our own skins."
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"The disastrous storms and events that had been happening for years in other parts of the world had finally come for us."
During the wildfires in November 2018, the skies turned a deep purple in San Francisco. The air was so bad that it was unhealthy to go outside and schools had to close. We were fortunate to have family on the central coast, far from the choking smoke. We went there for a week so my daughter could play outside, so I could go on a run. So we could breathe.
I really thought the purple skies would do it – that everyone would finally get serious about taking on climate change. We would start doing whatever it took to reduce the carbon pollution that was going to make it very difficult for humans to live on earth. This wasn’t about making sure future generations would have a stable climate with abundant food and water, this was about saving our own skins. What other signs could we possibly need?
But as soon as the smoke cleared, everything went back as before. For most people, nothing really changed. The same was true for me personally. While I made more presentations and talked to more people about climate change, my life was essentially no different. Until 2020.
On the morning of Sept 9, 2020, I opened my eyes and saw that my entire bedroom was colored a pinkish-orange. I realized this light was coming from the sky outside. The sun had been blocked by a massive veil of wildfire smoke. By mid-morning, the sky was a deep orange and a heavy smell of burning pressed upon us. Day looked and felt like night. I was the Executive Director of a nonprofit and I cancelled all our external meetings. I was not going to pretend like everything was OK and we could just go on as usual.
The sky was on fire and there was nowhere to escape. Wildfires were raging up and down the entire west coast. There was nowhere I could go to protect my daughter and myself. No amount of privilege could change things. The disastrous storms and events that had been happening for years in other parts of the world had finally come for us.
HOW COMMITTING TO MY PURPOSE GAVE ME COURAGE
I knew I had to make a change. I wanted to focus only on this issue–to devote my career to advancing climate solutions. I had to do more.
I knew I wanted to use my career experience with mission-driven organizations around the world to collaborate with other leaders and organizations committed to creating the future we need.
I began actively researching the latest climate and nature positive development strategies and discovered how they are benefit multipliers. When we do things like integrate clean energy into our built environment, rewild natural areas, and bring more nature into cities, we get a huge array of benefits–we are healthier, we earn and save money, we are safer and more resilient–allowing us and the living world to thrive.
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"I was connecting to what was possible and wanted to help others do the same."
Just like I had started seeing the signs of climate impacts everywhere, I started seeing potential climate solutions everywhere I looked. I was connecting to what was possible and wanted to help others do the same. Most of all, I wanted to draw on my experience delivering innovative initiatives and scaling pioneering organizations to help others do the same.
As a single parent, I was hesitant to leave my secure job as a nonprofit executive. At the same time, I knew my daughter’s future depended on much more than this. I also wanted to set an example for her of what it means to be true to your purpose.
In early 2022, I made the leap. Now I am collaborating with nonprofit, private sector, and government leaders and organizations to create a world where people and the living world can thrive.
Together we can create the future we need.
Experience
WORK
Strategic Consultant for Mission-Driven Organizations, Speaker, and Writer, 2022 – Present
Executive Director, Urban Land Institute (ULI) San Francisco, 2016 – 2022
Vice President, World Green Building Council, 2011 – 2015
Principal, Michelle Malanca Consulting, 2007 – 2011
Technical Director, Green Building Council of Australia, 2005 – 2007
PRO BONO AND VOLUNTEER
WELL City Advisor, International Well Building Institute, 2022 – present
Executive Mentor, Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship, 2023 – 2024
Executive Steering Committee Member, Mayor’s Zero Emission Building Task Force, City of San Francisco, 2019 – 2020
Policy Paper Contributor and Event Organizer, Clean Energy for Biden, 2020
Board Member, Place Lab, 2017 – 2019
Co-Chair, Sustainability Committee. ULI San Francisco, 2010 – 2016
Advisor, Pollinate Energy, 2010 – 2016
EDUCATION
Stanford University, Professional Certificate, Energy Innovation and Emerging Technologies, 2023
University of California, Santa Cruz, B.A., Environmental Studies, Board and Thesis Honors