Leith Sharp: Embracing “disruptive sustainability”
Leith Sharp comes to McGill February 27th, 2014, here she answers some pertinent questions:
Published on Feb 20, 2014 | McGill Reporter
by the McGill Reporter Staff
Leith Sharp, Director, Executive Education for Sustainability Leadership, Center for Health and the Global Environment, Harvard School of Public Health, has more than 18 years of experience greening universities, first at the University of New South Wales, where she earned her undergraduate degree in environmental engineering, then at Harvard, where she was the founding director of the school’s Green Campus Initiative in 1999. As director, Sharp built the largest green campus organization in the world. The program’s efforts were funded largely by the savings it produced – the essence of sustainability.
On Thursday, Feb. 27, McGill Net Positive will welcome Sharp as she will use lessons learned from the Harvard green building case study, along with other leading organizations, to explore how sustainability can be an innovation driver to transform the 21st century university. For full lecture details, go .
Leith’s is the second lecture in a four-part series run by McGill Net Positive, a project aimed at connecting sustainability actions across campus in a central hub.
As Director, Executive Education for Sustainability at Harvard, what is your role?
This is a new role created under Harvard’s Center for Health and the Global Environment to enable senior leaders to meet the challenge of driving sustainability into the core business or mission of their organization. We recognize two central leadership demands that are currently underserved.
One is to for individual leaders to become transformational sustainability leaders, that is to be capable of leading systemic change that will shift the sustainability emphasis from just ‘doing less bad’ to leveraging sustainability as an innovation, growth and effectiveness driver.
Read the rest of the questions