An Interview With Monica Sanders
The path to justice is not comfortable and convenient. As Bryan Stevenson, death row attorney and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative explains, to work for justice we must be willing to venture into uncomfortable territories and bear witness to difficult truths.
According to the University of Colorado, “Those who are most affected and have the fewest resources to adapt to climate change are also the least responsible for the greenhouse gas emissions — both globally and within the United States.” Promoting climate justice is an incredibly important environmental responsibility that is slowly becoming more and more recognized. In this interview series, we are talking to leaders who are helping to promote sustainability and climate justice. As part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Corrina Grace.
Corrina is a social entrepreneur, engineer, sustainability leader and author who has dedicated her career to building and strengthening social impact organizations.
She is the coFounder of the UNESCO-award winning SERES, an organization working for social and climate justice amongst vulnerable and marginalized communities in Central America where she currently serves as Senior Advisor and Board Member. She is also an Advisory Board Member for Tierra & Lava, a woman-owned social enterprise harnessing the wisdom of Mayan healing practices into clean and ethical beauty products.
Corrina is a Fellow of the 10th class of the Central America Leadership Initiative and a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network. She holds a Masters in Social Innovation for Sustainable Development from Università degli Studi di Torino and a Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of New South Wales, Sydney.
Her most recent book is called The Weaver’s Way: What An Ancient Art Can Teach You About Your Approach to Shaping Change.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit. Can you tell us a bit about how you grew up?
Of course. It’s a delight to have this opportunity to share with your audience.
I grew up in far northern New South Wales, in Australia. While not the outback, it was still pretty rural — the kind of place where you measured the distance to your nearest neighbors in miles, not minutes.
Back in the 70s, before my sisters and I were born, my parents decided they needed to prepare for the impending climate catastrophe. So they left Sydney, purchased a 100-acre farm, and looked to become self-sufficient. But by the time three young children came around, my parents had reevaluated their priorities and decided to embrace some of the modern conveniences like supermarkets and indoor toilets. Nevertheless, I think this upbringing helped to shape who I am today in two very important ways. Firstly, it gave me an appreciation of what it means to be in right relationship with the land as well as an understanding of how hard that work can be! And secondly — for myself and my two sisters — it solidified a driving passion for environmental and climate issues from a very young age.
Everyone has a cataclysmic moment or marker in their life which propels them to take certain actions, a “why”. What is your why?
I’m not sure about cataclysmic — but there was absolutely a moment when my life’s trajectory took a sharp turn, and headed off in a very different direction. At the time, I was working for Australia’s largest investment bank — on my way to a very successful career, at least by any mainstream metrics. Then began what I think of as my ‘slow dawn’. I began to travel extensively for work and as I did I became increasingly aware that I had won the birth lottery — born in a country with strong social safety nets and public services, and where the meritocracy myth was still alive and well — at least for people that looked like me. This dawning awareness was deeply uncomfortable, and this discomfort sharpened the edges of my perception and started to create a self-reinforcing cycle of discovery for all of the privileges that my birth and upbringing afforded me.
Then one month, I took my first trip to Latin America — Mexico, it was. Up until that moment I had proudly identified as a sustainability leader but back then, sustainability was really seen as an environmental issue. But that trip helped me realize that it wasn’t just an environmental issue, but a social issue as well. I saw in vivid detail how it was that those with the least resources were forced to live in the most environmentally degraded, unhealthy places. And conversely where you have populations without resources, living in extreme poverty, the environment also suffers. It was there — bearing witness to the stark reality of environmental degradation and economic marginalization — that I realized where my future lay.
You are currently leading an organization that is making a difference for our planet. Can you tell us a bit about what you and your organization are trying to change?
My experience leading a nonprofit organization in Central America for ten years revealed some very uncomfortable truths about the kinds of solutions (and leaders) that get funded, and those that don’t. Our culture has a bit of an obsession with heroes. But the problem with heroes is that most of the time they don’t look a lot like you or I, and even less like the people on the frontlines and in the trenches who are doing the really hard work of solving the critical problems of our times.
I don’t believe in heroes, but I do believe in ordinary people doing extraordinary things. And I know from experience that that work is hard. Really hard. So when I stepped down from the leadership of SERES back in 2019, I made a decision to build a new organization dedicated to serve those who are on the frontlines, but missing from the mainstream conversations. In service to those leaders, I work to move resources, funding, and investment from the center to the margins, and voices and ideas from the margins to the center. It’s work I call “weaving”, and I believe it’s fundamental in helping to repair and strengthen our fraying social fabric, and come together to solve the complex challenges that face us all at this kairos moment in human history.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began leading your company or organization?
On a personal note, I think that the most interesting thing that has happened (and keeps happening) to me since I began this journey back in my late 20s is understanding how fundamental our stories and paradigms are to shaping the work that we engage in in the world.
Donella Meadows, one of the world’s leading systems thinkers, was actually one of the first people to identify this: she believed that changing our mental models, or patterns of thinking, is the highest leverage point for creating more effective solutions for climate change and other sustainability challenges. But it’s hard work. Our worldviews are so deeply embedded in our sense of self and our place in the world, so ingrained into our thinking and behavior, that they are often invisible. But when we run up against them — wow, that’s a shock to the system!
I remember the time I first started to see how my Western worldview, with its widespread worship of capitalism, caused me to commodify everything. It was back in early 2020, when SERES was just a nascent organization. We were bootstrapping with the best of them, and everything I did was done with a sense of the utmost urgency.
I know it isn’t uncommon when we work for issues close to our hearts, but I’ve also learned that it’s also a hallmark of a worldview that teaches us that our worth is derived from our ability to produce work.“Time is money”, I would say to my stressed out colleagues. “We’re on a deadline.” Then one day Abigail, a dear friend and colleague, came to me and sat down to talk. “If time is money,” she asked, “then are you commodifying our friendship? The time we spend together?” That question led to a series of conversations — often difficult, sometimes confronting, in which Abigail started to help me to understand the concept of time through her Tzutujil indigenous worldview which is nothing like the linear, neatly parceled out sense of time that we in the West maintain.
I have many more examples of these kinds of moments — moments when I realize that my ability to see a solution is limited by the narrow confines of my worldview. Questioning my own paradigms can be pretty uncomfortable work but without a doubt I know that the more I pursue this inner journey of self-awareness, the closer I get to being able to shape truly transformative and inclusive solutions to the sustainability crisis.
None of us can be successful without some help along the way. Did you have mentors or cheerleaders who helped you to succeed? Can you tell us a story about their influence?
There is a concept in Buddhism, “warm hand to warm hand.” It’s a message about relationships: how wisdom, compassion, and care are passed on, person to person. Whenever I think about what I’ve achieved, I think about this idea. I’m acutely aware that I’m successful because my community — in the broadest sense of the word — has allowed me to be successful. That this work — my work — is the product of so many acts of love and kindness and generosity. It’s hard to name names.
As I was writing my book, however, I was thinking a lot about stories — specifically, what are the stories we learn or inherit that we find ourselves living, without ever noticing? It made me think a lot about my paternal grandmother. She was a woman born out of place and time. If she was born now, I’m certain she’d be working in some leading tech startup or making her way on a mission to Mars. As it was, her story was limited by the narrow confines of gender discrimination, multi-generational post-traumatic stress disorder, and unjust social hierarchies. But despite this, she found a way to reach beyond those barriers to sow the seeds of a different story in me. When, at a young age, I dreamed of being an engineer she was the first to say ‘yes, you can’. When I dreamed of traveling beyond my rural hometown, she would ask how far and how wide. I’ve faced a lot of adversity in my life — people telling me that what I dreamed wasn’t possible. But amazingly, it’s never held me back. And I think that’s because of those early seeds that my grandmother planted. This idea that I was more than the single story I was being handed. That I had the power to write a new story, and that if I could change the story, then I could change the world.
Thank you for that. Let’s now move to the central part of our discussion. Let’s start with a basic definition of terms so that everyone is on the same page. What does climate justice mean to you? How do we operationalize it?
For me, climate justice is the idea that the negative impacts of climate change and environmental degradation are not distributed equally and that vulnerable and marginalized communities are disproportionately affected. It’s also an invitation to think about legacy. We don’t live our lives in isolation, but as part of an historical throughline. The actions (or inaction) we take today will have long-lasting impacts on the health and wellbeing of future populations, just as we are living now with the consequences of decisions made by our ancestors. Climate justice is about asking ourselves how we can be accountable to each other, and to the generations that will follow after us.
To start to understand and operationalize this, we need to start with an understanding of a concept I refer to in my book as ‘The Laws of Interconnectedness’. It’s a concept that’s present in many indigenous cultural domains, but is still fairly nascent in the Western worldview. The premise is simple: each and everyone’s existence is deeply tied to that of others. But understanding the fundamental interconnectivity of ecosystems, economies, and social systems requires a pretty big shift from what until this moment has been a longstanding emphasis on individualism and reductionism.
What that ultimately means is that for climate justice work to be effective, it cannot come from a place of charity for the other. It must come from an understanding that we are all part of a greater system and that when one part of the system suffers, all parts are affected. I think Dr. Lilla Watson, Australian First Nations Aboriginal Murri elder, summarized it best when she said “If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. If you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
This means that whatever the solution — be it policy, technology, education, advocacy or awareness building — we need to ensure that our work is grounded in ideas of reciprocity, coexistence, cooperation, and shared accountability. I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am.
Science is telling us that we have 7–10 years to make critical decisions about climate change. What are three things you or your organization are doing to help?
Firstly, I believe that consequential decisions should be made by those that pay the consequences. That means shifting decision-making, power and resources to those that are on the front lines, facing climate change and living with our legacy of unsustainable development every day. I am working to resource those leaders, while also leveraging my access and privilege to help the voices unheard become part of the narrative. When I get a seat at the proverbial table I look around to see who is present and who is absent, and do whatever I can to close that gap.
Secondly, I’m working to redefine leadership through coaching and training programs. It may not seem like an obvious solution for climate justice but it is key to creating change. Our leadership is reflected each moment of the day in the way we work and walk in this world. It’s reflected in the conversations we have, the questions we ask, and the way we build our organizations and movements. We cannot do the outer work of building a more just future unless we also do the inner work, and the ability to cultivate new leadership that moves away from hyper-individualism and the pursuit of personal success to a success that puts the wellbeing of all living things in the center. In the words of Reverend Angel Kyodo Williams, “Without inner change there can be no outer change, without collective change, no change matters.”
Finally, I seek to heal what I think of as the great malaise of the 21st century — denying ourselves the ability to take action on the things that are most important to us. For too long, mainstream messaging from the media, politicians, and corporations has tried to convince us that ordinary people will never change anything. That’s a dangerous fallacy. Wherever in the world you may be right now, we can no longer afford the luxury of feeling powerless. Through my teaching and writing, I strive to empower individuals to find their inner strength and determination to make a difference, and realize that they have the ability to create change from wherever they stand.
Are there three things the community, society, or politicians can do to help you in your mission?
- Fund local leaders: If we want to build climate resilience, then we need to fund local leaders and locally-led solutions, increasing investment in building genuine local participation, and concentrating efforts to shape a system where local communities are empowered with the capacity to address the challenges that impact them. There are a number of organizations that do this really well. Some that I’m familiar with are the CLIMA Fund, the Global Greengrants Fund, Thousand Currents and Partners Asia.
- Amplify the voices of frontline communities: Communities that are most impacted by the effects of climate change often have the least access to decision-making processes and resources. By elevating their voices and experiences, we can build more inclusive and effective solutions to climate change.
- Seize authorship over our unwritten future: I believe that we all have a responsibility to realize our own leadership potential, and work to shape systems and move beyond business as usual approaches. I wrote my book The Weaver’s Way because I wanted to inspire people to join me in shaping change for a more just and equitable future for people and our planet. Your readers can support this mission by gifting a copy to someone whom they believe has the potential to create change in the world around them.
How would you articulate how a business can become more profitable by being more sustainable and more environmentally conscious? Can you share a story or example?
I think that this idea that profit is just about finances is one of the old paradigms that we need to move away from. The notion that we have to choose between profit and social/environmental issues creates a false binary that limits our imaginations when it comes to thinking about a more socially just, ecologically sustainable future. I believe that success in the future will be those businesses that understand that long term profitability is fundamentally tied to social and environmental accountability.
One of the really interesting areas where I’m seeing this emerge is through a network I belong to called Coralus, which is radically rethinking new ways to lend money, build businesses, and make real progress on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Through this network, members contribute to a Perpetual Capital Fund that is loaned out to selected Ventures at 0% interest, then cycled back in to support the next round of companies. The result? An impressive network of hundreds of ventures who are working at the intersection of profit and purpose.
In the time that I’ve been involved with Coralus, I’ve noticed there are two things that the businesses we support have in common. Firstly (this is a prerequisite) all of these companies are majority-owned and led by women or nonbinary folks, who would otherwise struggle to get financing through traditional means. And secondly, they are committed to doing it differently. Whether it’s a packaging solution to reduce the environmental impact from waste or a sustainable clothing startup, these companies are part of the growing body of evidence that shows that businesses that integrate profit and purpose will be key in achieving a just transition to a more sustainable future.
This is the signature question we ask in most of our interviews. What are your “5 things I wish someone told me when I first started promoting sustainability and climate justice” and why? Please share a story or example for each.
- Being uncomfortable is part of the work
The path to justice is not comfortable and convenient. As Bryan Stevenson, death row attorney and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative explains, to work for justice we must be willing to venture into uncomfortable territories and bear witness to difficult truths.
This is why so many activists and change makers burn out. Our work is not easy. It asks of us to stand with our eyes wide open, opening ourselves up to the painful reality of a world in distress. This can have an immense toll on our well-being. If we want prevent burnout, we need to be resilient. And to do that, we have to make sure that we are paing attention to our own self-development and personal growth at the same times as pursuing our external efforts to drive change.
It took me a long time to realize this because I felt that focusing on personal growth was self-centered and egocentric, detracting from my mission. As a consequence I paid a high price: in mental and physical well-being, strained relationships, and ultimately in the impact of the work I was doing. But after 15 years in the field, I’ve come to develop a deep appreciation for how important the dynamic interrelationship between inner life and the outer world is to this work of building more just and sustainable communities.
Nowadays, in all of my work with change makers, this is our starting point because I’ve learned it’s the only way that we can do this uncomfortable and difficult work and still show up each day with a compassionate heart, curious mind and courageous spirit.
2. It’s okay not to have all of the answers
I grew up in an education system that taught me that in order to succeed I needed to get A’s, and in order to get A’s, I needed to have the right answers. There are some fields where this is important, but I don’t think this kind of thinking is helpful for this work.
Firstly, our need to always have answers makes us terrible at dealing with paradox in a world that is inherently paradoxical. The ability to hold paradox is essential to navigating complex and ambiguous situations where there are often multiple, conflicting perspectives and interests at play. Leaders who are able to hold paradox recognize that there is rarely a single “right” answer or solution, and instead embrace the tension between seemingly opposing ideas or viewpoints.
I remember how vital this skill became when we began to expand the team of the organization I was leading in Guatemala. We had an incredibly diverse and vibrant team with many different nationalities, ethnicities, languages and cultures and I wanted to ensure our organization was set up to take advantage of this diversity. I wanted to foster a culture of inclusivity and open dialogue, where different ideas and viewpoints are welcomed and valued. And the only way to do this was to learn to embrace paradox, and accept that I didn’t have all of the answers.
The other place where an education system that values answers over questions can be problematic is in the way we approach our work. Early on, I quickly learned that my need for answers was connected to a very industrialized command-and-control way of thinking. One that saw the world as linear and predictable and not at all the way that communities — and change process — work. Acknowledging that I didn’t have all the answers was a frightening process, but one that transformed my leadership and the impact of my work in profound ways.
3. We must examine the assumptions on which our solutions are based.
I remember the first time I came across Audrey Lorde’s essay “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master’s House.” It was around the time we were working to transition from a very grassroots, organic movement into something more formal, and things felt really hard. Like somehow we’d lost the magic that had kept everything moving. The relationships within the organization were tense, the partnerships we were building didn’t feel aligned to the work we were doing, and I had lost all of my joy.
Coming across Lorde’s work helped me to see why. It was timely, but profoundly difficult. It made me stop and to begin to question the assumptions on which I had been trying to build the organization. And as I did so, I realized that I’d been responsible for upholding paradigms I know have been used to oppress and destroy, yearning for change while sustaining the structural inadequacy of the very systems I was fighting against.
Many of our solutions designed to address injustice and create more inclusive and sustainable communities are built on the very systems and structures that created the injustices in the first place. At best, this can lead to ineffective solutions. At worst — which I’ve seen on too many occasions — they perpetuate the trauma, oppression and suffering that the solutions are designed to fix.
4. None can do it alone
For most of my life, I was raised on the kinds of success stories that worshiped the mythology of singular achievement, glorifying the independent hero and their entrepreneurial spirit. And I tried to emulate those success stories when I first started out doing this work. But those stories…I think that they’re part of the problem, not part of the solution.
It all comes back to this idea of interdependence. The ability to say “we need each other.” I have a good friend who talks about “fragments of ideas”. It’s the idea that we each hold a piece of the puzzle, and our work is to see how those pieces fit together to become part of the whole.
This kind of attitude has taught me a lot about the importance of humility in our work. Humility and curiosity. Humility creates the space wherein we become comfortable with not knowing, and curiosity moves us forward. We learn to lead with questions, not with answers, and value the dialogue that those questions invite. And in that dialogue, we start to build the kind of deep, collaborative and trusting relationships that are required to solve the complex, interconnected challenges that we face today.
5. That this would be the most rewarding work I could do.
When I stepped away from my career in corporate sustainability and into the world of climate justice, I got the sense from people that I was making a huge sacrifice — of wealth, power and privilege. And to be honest, I didn’t really know what to expect. I was stepping into the unknown, with my only certainty the sense that I needed to do something to start creating change on the issues that were closest to my heart.
But if I could reach back to that woman in her early 20s, I would tell her to rest easy. That this was the most rewarding path I could possibly choose. I may not have as much money as I did back in my old career, but I am infinitely wealthier in so many ways. I may not be considered as powerful as when I dressed in a power suit and rode the elevator to the top of the tallest office building, but the power that I do hold is more meaningful and purposeful. I am part of a community of people, the breadth, depth, and diversity of which takes my breath away. I am held in a network of relationships whose love and care is more authentic and deep than I ever dreamed possible. And I get to do work every day that is deeply connected to my purpose — a privilege for which I am profoundly grateful.
Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. 🙂
I’d love to spend time with organizational psychology and author Adam Grant, because of the work and advocacy that he does around our need to rethink. Even as I’ve learned that I need to be prepared to constantly challenge my own assumptions and rethink my beliefs, I know that I’ve got further to go. I also know that finding our way forward into a more inclusive and sustainable future is going to be as much about unlearning and relearning as it is about learning. I’m curious to think about how we do this at the scale and pace we need within the timelines that we’re facing.
How can our readers continue to follow your work online?
Your readers can follow me by signing up for my Gracing Change newsletter through my website or on social media through LinkedIn (@CorrinaGrace), Facebook and Instagram (@corrinaagrace).
This was very meaningful, thank you so much. We wish you only continued success on your great work!
Thank you!
About the Interviewer: Monica Sanders JD, LL.M, is the founder of “The Undivide Project”, an organization dedicated to creating climate resilience in underserved communities using good tech and the power of the Internet. She holds faculty roles at the Georgetown University Law Center and the Tulane University Disaster Resilience Leadership Academy. Professor Sanders also serves on several UN agency working groups. As an attorney, Monica has held senior roles in all three branches of government, private industry, and nonprofits. In her previous life, she was a journalist for seven years and the recipient of several awards, including an Emmy. Now the New Orleans native spends her time in solidarity with and championing change for those on the frontlines of climate change and digital divestment. Learn more about how to join her at: www.theundivideproject.org.
How Author Corrina Grace Is Helping to Promote Sustainability and Climate Justice was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.