Sustainability consultant Charles Orgbon traces his path from founding the youth environmental nonprofit Greening Forward at age 12 to corporate sustainability consulting at Deloitte and Ernst & Young, and explains how ESG reporting is shifting from voluntary best practice to data held to financial-grade controls.
00:00:04:02 - 00:00:15:01
Sara Gutterman: Thank you so much for your time today. It's lovely to have the opportunity to talk with you. If you don't mind, I'd love for you to just take a few minutes and tell me about yourself and the work that you do.
00:00:15:03 - 00:00:55:21
Charles Orgbon: My journey as an environmentalist began when I was 12 years old, where I noticed my school's littering problem, and I wanted to tell other people, tell other people that littering is bad. That there's more issues around environmental issues that we should be thinking about and considering. And at that time, it was pretty easy to create a website, and I created a website called Greening Forward that helped talk about some of these issues in Green Forward evolved to then be an organization that not just lists lived in the internet, but on the ground working with young people.
00:00:55:21 - 00:01:24:22
Charles Orgbon: And as a young person myself, then I wanted to give resources and support to other young people who wanted to create change around environmental issues in their communities as well. So Greening Forward became a grant making vehicle for young climate activists. We also became a convener and created conferences where young people trained other young people on environmental issues.
00:01:24:22 - 00:01:53:28
Charles Orgbon: And through this work of youth climate organizing and leading this nonprofit, I actually got to interface with corporate sustainability folks and that sort of where I where my path went next. And so I was then at Deloitte doing corporate sustainability consulting, working at a much larger scale. Right. Because a lot of companies are bigger than some countries, actually.
00:01:54:01 - 00:02:21:20
Charles Orgbon: So when we think about their supply chain, we think about their impacts on the environment, plenty of opportunities to think about the intersection with climate change and make sure that they're being really mindful about how climate change is going to impact their business, and how can we address climate change, because doing so will also set them up for long term viability, even as a business.
00:02:21:23 - 00:03:03:06
Charles Orgbon: And then I made the move a couple of years ago to Ernst and Young, continuing to work in sustainability consulting. But something fundamentally shifted between the Deloitte experience and the UI experience. And that was the timing of being in this space where we used to live in a voluntary marketplace for ESG, where reporting on your scope one, scope to scope three emissions was best practice, but there weren't consequences for your lack of reporting around these things.
00:03:03:06 - 00:03:35:22
Charles Orgbon: And we're moving away from that now. We're moving into where this data is being taken more seriously, being evolving to a place where the the controls that you would see over financial data, which is really tight. We're starting to see that tightening happen also with ESG data. And so the stakes are higher. The pressure is higher. So those are things that have definitely definitely changed.
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Charles Orgbon: But all for good reason right. Because as we design these systems, we are creating the opportunity to make more informed decision making around what levers do we pull to address climate change.
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Sara Gutterman: When working with Greening Forward, what did you find motivates young people the most in terms of their sustainability journey, and what facilitated that journey in the most high impact and expedient way?
00:04:11:22 - 00:04:57:00
Charles Orgbon: Yeah, other young people like getting the messaging from other young people was particularly inspiring. And I think that's what made our model unique is this train the trainer. But youth to youth campaigning and organizing and movement building. So who was the person at the front of the room at the Youth Climate Summit? It needs to be a young person talking to other young people, and who got to design the flow of this conference for other young climate activists supposed to inspire them, other young people, like there's lots of opportunities to just give the reins to young people and to allow them to drive, drive the ship.
00:04:57:03 - 00:05:40:04
Charles Orgbon: For it's been in existence for over 15 years. So now we have, you know, folks that have in grad school and are doctors and that are doing international development work. And, and I think about how greening for became an outlet for them to sort of practice those leadership skills that they now have mastered in adulthood. But to have an organization, it's like, here's here's what our purpose is, is for you to practice these leadership skills and to do so in a container where it's not like adults telling you this is what you have to do.
00:05:40:05 - 00:05:53:02
Charles Orgbon: It's like young people saying, this is what we want to do. And that sort of mentality totally changes everyone's connection to the work and wanting to build, wanting to be a part of the work.