Bold Women, Sustainable Futures: No Straight Path to Sustainability Leadership
Join The SustainabilityX® Magazine during Climate Week NYC for a virtual conversation exploring the many ways women find, shape, and redefine their paths into sustainability leadership. This event is also a virtual book tour event inspired by Supriya Verma’s debut book, Bold Women, Sustainable Futures: Leadership Lessons in an Age of Resistance launched in March 2026 (Women’s Month).
There is no single path into sustainability leadership.
Most career advice assumes an orderly progression: earn the right degree, enter the right field, accumulate the expected experience, and steadily advance into a clearly defined sustainability role. Yet many of the women leading change across climate, business, policy, governance, media, entrepreneurship, and social impact arrived through far less conventional routes.
Their journeys have crossed disciplines, industries, organizations, and identities. They have built sustainability careers through unexpected opportunities, transferable skills, career pivots, entrepreneurial ventures, pauses, restarts, and the ongoing work of repositioning experience that may not initially appear to fit.
For women, these professional journeys are also rarely separate from life itself. Caregiving, motherhood, migration, health, grief, burnout, family responsibilities, financial realities, identity shifts, recovery, and personal reinvention can alter the direction and pace of a career. These experiences are not simply interruptions to leadership. They can deepen the empathy, resilience, courage, perspective, self-awareness, and conviction women bring to their work.
Building on the strong response to our Women with Non-Linear Careers in Sustainability conversation co-hosted with Good Principles™ during Toronto Climate Week in June, this Climate Week NYC book tour event continues the discussion through a new lens. It explores not only how women find their way into sustainability, but how their professional and personal journeys shape the leaders they become.
Rather than a traditional panel or fireside chat, each featured speaker will have five to six minutes to share a focused reflection on her own journey. Together, these stories will explore career pivots, interdisciplinary experience, transferable skills, personal turning points, resistance, gatekeeping, burnout, reinvention, authenticity, community, and the courage to continue when the path ahead is uncertain.
The event asks:
How do women build meaningful sustainability careers when their paths do not follow a straight line—and how do they continue leading without losing themselves in an age of uncertainty, backlash, and resistance?
Attendees will hear honest and practical reflections from women working across sustainability, climate, policy, business, governance, media, entrepreneurship, and impact. They will leave with greater clarity about how to communicate the value of their own experiences, recognize transferable strengths, navigate professional transitions, and understand that a non-linear journey can be a source of credibility, perspective, and leadership.
Whether you are entering sustainability, pivoting from another sector, navigating unfair systems and backlash in your current role, rebuilding after a pause, navigating a personal transition, or reconsidering what leadership means to you, this event offers an invitation to see your journey not as a collection of detours, but as part of the foundation from which you lead.
Speakers and Participants
- Supriya Verma — Host and Moderator; Founder, The SustainabilityX® Magazine
- Katie Elder — Founder, Good Principles™
- Jaclyn Whittal — Meteorologist, Climate Journalist and Founder, One Earth Communications
- Tensie Whelan — Distinguished Professor of Practice Emerita, Business and Society; Senior Adviser, NYU Stern Center for Sustainable Business, New York University
- Roberta Boscolo — Head of Climate and Energy Unit, World Meteorological Organization