Sustainability Leadership Initiative

Engage corporate sustainability leaders and state conservation advocates in creative, collaborative, and visionary conversations about how to lead South Carolina in pursuing and achieving more sustainable economic development. How can a range of stakeholders move from competitive, zero-sum, short-term thinking about tradeoffs between development and conservation, to a vision of a more dynamic future?

Openfields helped design and facilitate the inaugural nine-month Fellowship program, leading four interactive workshops:

  • Systems Leadership: Seeing systems and leading cultural change
  • Foresight & Long-Term Thinking: Tools for imagining and designing multiple possible futures
  • Imagination & Justice: Working like artists and adventurers beyond the system
  • Story as Strategy: Narrating change, building movements

Fellows generated insights and developed creative thinking skills that helped them identify and begin to develop solutions to some of South Carolina's most immediate sustainability challenges, including improving its state ranking in achieving the UN's Sustainability Development Goals.

Our work with Openfields has helped us see the limits in our own thinking and begin to generate ideas and alternatives to challenge and transform the status quo.

Dr. Jackie Counts
Director of the Center for Public Partnerships & Research at the University of Kansas