(slow contemplative music)
- Hi, my name is Mark Tercek.
I'm the CEO of the Nature Conservancy, known as TNC.
I joined 10 years ago.
Before that, I was an investment banker for 24 years,
kind of a mainstream investment banking career,
but late in my career as a banker,
I got very interested in environmental problems
in general, climate change in particular,
and business as a force for addressing those issues.
Those interests of mine caused me, at the end of my career,
to have a kind of a weird jab in the end of 2005.
Hank Paulson, who was the CEO of Goldman Sachs at the time,
appointed me to be the head
of Goldman Sachs' new environmental strategies group.
I did that work for a couple of years.
I learned a lot.
One day a head hunter called me up asking me
if I had any ideas for a search they were doing.
They were looking for a new seat head
for the Nature Conservancy,
and I said as a matter of fact, I do have one idea, me.
And everyone laughed and said Mark,
they're never gonna name a banker the head of TNC,
but lo and behold I got the job in July 2008,
and I've been here ever since.
- Hi, my name is Vien Truong.
I'm the CEO of The Dream Corps.
Our work is to close prison doors
and to open doors of opportunity.
And this includes our Green for All work,
which is to create a green economy
strong enough to lift people out of poverty.
For the last 10 years, I've been working
on environmental policy to really address
both the issues of poverty and pollution.
And that has brought me to the post I am at today.
That work has got to bridge beyond just the narrow framing
of environmentalism and climate change
to really look at what sustainability really looks like
in this country and for our communities.
And so the Dream Corps will look at our communities
as a whole and how do we actually reach out
to create a better quality of life
for people who are the most underserved.
My family came here as refugees from the war in Vietnam.
When we first got here my parents,
who are both, never had any formal education
are quote unquote illiterate, they came here
and the only jobs that they could find were on farmlands.
They were migrant farm workers in Portland, Oregon
where they picked strawberries and snow peas,
often times with me strapped to their back.
When my grandma started getting dementia,
we decided to move Oakland, California
where there were some relatives
who could watch her while they were at work.
And we came here to Oakland,
and the only jobs that they could find
during the early '80s was in sweat shops.
So my parents have 11 kids.
I'm the youngest of the 11 kids.
Raising us in East Oakland and then in West Oakland,
during the crack years of the '80s was not easy.
And every year, they tried to find a safe apartment,
a safe place for us to live in.
That led us to move to a different place
every single year of my life,
and as long as I can remember,
we were looking at just litter on the streets,
violence in our schools,
looking at really unsafe conditions in our neighborhoods,
roaches in the kitchen.
That was a constant no matter where we lived.
And what I learned was that these things,
while they felt normal to me,
when I finally had a chance to move out of Oakland,
I realized they really weren't normal conditions.
Literally dodging bullets and seeing my first homicide
when I was eight years old is not a normal thing.
And so for me, I wanted to figure out
what were the underlying causes of these problems,
and that led me to the work of policy.
And in the last 10 years having had a chance
to work on environmental policy,
which, by the way, is not just about particular matters,
it's not just about suits or ground water contamination.
For me, I understand environmentalism
to be our communities, our environment,
the conditions inside the household
as well as outside the household.
So working on environmentalism the last 10 years,
having had passed policies
at the federal, state and local levels,
has led me to understand what are some of the ways
that these solutions have to break out
of the environmentalism silos,
but also what are the opportunities for us to do so
when we do that to address
not only the climate change issues,
but also the economic issues.
So that's been my focus for the last 10 years.
- I'm Michael Kobori, Vice President of Sustainability
at Levi Strauss and Company,
And I started down this path of sustainability
first by spending about 10 years
doing international development
and human rights work at the Asia Foundation.
I lived in Dhaka, Bangladesh for two years,
in Bangkok, Thailand for two years,
and we were funding local NGOs, business groups,
government agencies to do economic development
and human rights work.
And that's really how I came
to this field of sustainability.
It was from the human rights side of things.
And when I joined Levi's, it was in the mid '90s,
when the apparel industry had expanded overseas
to a lot of developing countries,
and there were factories in many developing countries.
And there was a lot of concern
for the welfare of the workers
who were making apparel in those countries.
And there was a lot of activism in those days
around the issue, and that's how I first got very involved
in sustainability really from the human rights side.
Later, as I headed up the function at Levi's,
we brought in the environmental
and health and safety aspects of sustainability.
So in my role, as Head of Sustainability here,
we are responsible for both the labor,
the social side of sustainability,
as well as the environmental side for the entire company.
Now I report to our Head of Global Supply Chain
and so our primary responsibility
is to make sure that the factories,
the suppliers that we work with all around the world
are following our standards.
But we also work with them to go well beyond our standards
and actually try to develop programs
that are really going above and beyond
that are, for example, in the area of water
starting to develop programs to recycle the water,
not just to meet our water quality standards.
In the area of workers, it's not just
to meet our labor protections for workers, to make sure
that our vendors are following local labor standards,
or actually international labor standards.
It is to figure out how do we work with our suppliers
to improve workers' well-being,
improve their health, improve their financial literacy.
So these are the types of programs
that we're implementing in the supply chain,
but my role as Head of Sustainability goes beyond that
to encompass the entire company's operations
and set our vision and our goal for sustainability
and how we integrate it
throughout all of our operations, everything that we do.