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Partnership

THE GREEN ROOM (Episode 15): Gerod Rody and Sophia Paul on Bridging Queer Identity and Sustainability Values

GREEN ROOM: LIVE WEBINAR

Summary of the Discussion

Gerod Rody is the founder of OUT for Sustainability, gave a brief history organization, its mission and challenges in the last 13 years. Also, during the session, Sophia Paul mentioned the achievements of the organization, post COVID-19 restructuring and the future engagement of the organization in helping the queer communities.

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ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Gerod Rody is the founder of OUT for Sustainability

Gerod Rody is the founder of OUT for Sustainability

ABOUT THE MODERATOR

Dr. Jason J. McSparren is an educator, researcher, and administrator with a PhD. in Global Governance and Human Security from Massachusetts Boston.

Dr. Jason J. McSparren is an educator, researcher, and administrator with a PhD. in Global Governance and Human Security from Massachusetts Boston.

Q&A

Jason: Greetings to our audience, thank you very much for joining us on the green room today.

I'm Jason McSparren, I'm the moderator for the green room here at the green Institute. Today, our discussion is about sustainable inclusion bridging queer identity and sustainability values. And we have two guests with us today which is really nice. We've got Gerod Rody and Sophia Paul. Please give everybody your silent applause and welcome to Gerod and Sophia.

Let me Please introduce them. Gerod Rody is the founder and former president of OUT for sustainability. Gerod has followed his passion for connecting various vision with near in action. He's animated by identity intersectionality, and where he sees fresh opportunities and spaces between established business practices and shifting cultural norms, is where he operates best, he is an innovative strategy consultant, focused on business design. He has worked with some of the largest organizations around the country and around the world, he applies his entrepreneurial creativity to benefit clients across sectors. He's worked in retail, finance, beauty and energy. And when he has a few extra minutes, his hobbies include long walks with his dog and Brooklyn, sharing meals with friends and traveling the world. Thank you very much for being here with us today Jerry. Thank you.

And I'd also like to introduce Sophia Paul. Sophia is the chair of the board at OUT for sustainability. Sophia is passionate about OUT for sustainability mission of environmental justice in climate resilient programs, created for in by LGBTQIA plus communities. Sophia has professional experience and collective processes in promoting diversity, equity and inclusion in the environmental movement. A graduate of Environmental Studies in Oberlin College, Sophia worked as a volunteer coordinator at a social service organization that focused on community engagement and food justice. Following that, they pursued a Masters of Science at the School of environment and sustainability at the University of Michigan. They focus on the studies and environmental justice in collaborative natural resource management. Currently, Sophia coordinates research and Institutional Diversity in equity in the environmental movement and plans conferences for young people, focus on equity in the environmental movement, currently living in Ohio, Sophia is employed at the trust for Public Land. Sophia spends their free time gardening, baking and training for their first marathon. Good luck with that.

Sophia: Thank you.

 

Jason: You're welcome, and everything else you're doing.

Sophia: Thank you.

Jason: So thank you too very much for being here. We can start our conversation by talking about what was the genesis for your program OUT for sustainability. Gerod, can you talk to us about that, please.

Gerod: Yeah, absolutely. I've been involved with the queer community for a while, and then I decided, but I also had this deep passion for sustainability. So I went to business school, the famous Graduate Institute, and I found these amazing progressive people who are actively inclusive, but a completely invisible queer community within that. So it wasn't that there weren't queer people present but there was no connection there was, it felt like I was divorced from this other part of my identity. And so, notoriously I asked around and said, is there any kind of organization that exists, kind of along these lines, so I can give a date. But it really became much more than that very quickly. So we started doing stakeholder meetings and figure out like, does the world actually need this kind of organization or is it just me and maybe a few other people. So we built a board, we started doing some programming. And, you know, the thing I wanted to leave on this one is through all of the things we've done early on this try and learn model, it showed that even if you don't really like camping, like me, you can get involved with the environmental movement and the queer community and really bring these things together and get engaged, wherever you are.

Jason: I admired your entrepreneurial spirit. It really a good quality to have in, especially you know, the world needs leaders and it's really good to see. So tell us a little bit about, were there any challenges at the beginning that you had to overcome.

Gerod: A lot of it was just focus. What is the problem that we're solving. I got a lot of feedback of like this is nice. But, you know, is this do these two things have anything in common. And the, the original example I gave was, you know, there's get running groups there's queer foods contingents out there that are doing amazing work. Sustainability is so intrinsic to who we are as people and so essential to focus on is humanity that it was, it was a logic thing, we need to give everything we've got to surviving as a species and we can't survive if we ignore this incredibly essential and dynamic part of our human race. So in that respect, I think it was ended up being proving itself out that there is a value to this kind of organization. And thankfully there are a few others now, Doing this kind of work as well. Was 15 years later or something but I mean, the point is, it's been amazing to see how many points. Sustainability crosses with the career community like food, like health, like transportation, you know, anything sustainability is everywhere, it's every part of who we are and how we operate. So, Yeah, that would be my two cents.

Jason: I just got one quick question for you until you started to say about 15 years ago. Well, doing this work.

Gerod: Yeah, 2008.

Jason: Okay.

Gerod: Yeah.

Jason: And how large is your group nowadays in terms of membership

Gerod: Yeah so we've never been, you know, I stepped down from the board right before points only right before coven for a job that was going to have me traveling like three weeks, a month. But anyway, the point is, so I'm not totally up on the numbers, Sophia you may be able to step in but it's never been in a membership organization so we don't have, you know, kind of like a roster, but in terms of engagement, before that I think for 10 year and 2018, it was like 5000 people had been touched in some way by the organization like Atlanta, I'm sure it's grown since then, so

Jason: You know that's a significant amount of people because they have friends and contacts so that's really good. Yeah, I know that that's really good spread. Yes. Actually,

Gerod: Yea,

Jason: Thank you so much Gerod. Just give us one second, I'd like to bring Sophia in, but before we do that I just want to highlight one thing and share. After this the origin story. Yes, certainly. Okay. Yes, absolutely. I've got a question about to ask Sophia. I'm curious about how Out for sustainability is emerging. So perhaps you can talk about the mission, but prior to that I just want to again, just highlight our new guests today. We've got Gerod and Sophia from We're talking about bridging queer identity and sustainability, how they work for sustainability, you can find out for sustainability out4s.org. And then one thing I like to go to the green institute website is the website.greeninstituteng.com and you can get the latest book by Adenike Akinsemolu. Adenike is the director and founder of the group. And this is a fantastic book. You can read about the principles of green and sustainability science. The book is focused on the principles of green and sustainability science, using case studies across Africa, in the world. The book contributes to the literature about environmental science by expounding on the natural systems, and the scientific aspects of sustainability. Okay. So if we go back to our screen I don't want to share, and we'll go back to ask the question to Sophia. Sophia please Can you talk to us about how Out for sustainability is emerging

Favourite Quote

“...in a world of climate crisis and wherever these natural disasters, queer people have unique vulnerabilities”
— Sophia Paul

Top Comments

Don't think us inattentive, I don't have anything to ask, but it's been really interesting and inspiring so far!-Shaun Bryan

Thank you for the knowledge passed across-Olisa Ononye

THE GREEN ROOM (Episode 14): Jo-Anne McArthur on Bringing Visibility to Hidden Animals Worldwide

GREEN ROOM: LIVE WEBINAR

Summary of the Discussion

Jo-Anne McArthur a Photojournalist that focuses on animal rights emphasizes the need for the human race to notice the existence of animals and the cruelty that the animal face. She mentioned that animals are sentient beings and should be treated with respect. She shared some of her work which exposes some conditions that animals have to face which is against their rights.

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ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Jo-Anne McArthur is an award-winning photographer, author, and sought-after speaker.

Jo-Anne McArthur is an award-winning photographer, author, and sought-after speaker.

ABOUT THE MODERATOR

Dr. Jason J. McSparren is an educator, researcher, and administrator with a PhD. in Global Governance and Human Security from Massachusetts Boston.

Dr. Jason J. McSparren is an educator, researcher, and administrator with a PhD. in Global Governance and Human Security from Massachusetts Boston.

Q&A

Jason McSparren: Our friends in the audience please welcome Jo-Anne McArthur to the Green Room today. Hello Joanne

 

Jo-Anne McArthur: Hello thanks so much for inviting me.

 

Jason McSparren: Glad to have you Joanne. Can you see the screen? Okay.  Do you see the photos?

 

Jo-Anne McArthur: I can see your Power point. Yes

 

Jason McSparren: Okay very well, so like we could take a quick look at some of your photos just to give our audience an idea of some of the images that you might seein this latest book hidden animals in the anthropocene and it's an interesting cover.

 

Jo-Anne McArthur: I will say that all of the work you'll see in this Power point is mine, except for those which are captioned otherwise, this book hidden is my first foray into editing for a large photographic book so this isactually the work of 40 photojournalists globally. I knew I wanted to really be all encompassing with the subject matter and that I couldn't cover that alone with the work that I had done, so we see here images from Celine Magnolia, Aitor Garmendia This image is not mine, what we're seeing here are cultural events like this one here unusual and odd and horrific an incredible capture by Aitor Garmendia who's one of the leading animal photojournalists in the world right now. He's quite relentless in his work and you can skip back to the image of the pig in the garbage also a really highly unusual situation for us to see pigs end up in dumps all the time but this is out of sight and out of mind and what I mean by the ‘hidden animals’ which is the topic of the book, is that animals especially those who are farmed for food are raised by the billions and yet we only ever interact with them on our plate or the fur bearing animals we interact with them when we wear them and yet they are kept by the billions every single day and so we wanted to illuminate their lives so that we can make better decisions think a little bit more critically have important discussions because a lot of us care about animals but we care about the animals who are more familiar to us. Wildlife, companion animals and yet there are others who are as equally sentient and yet we fail to see and we mistreat horribly. An example is here, you've landed on this image of a turtle being filleted which is a word you used. I had not thought of that word for this image but that's exactly what's happening.The turtle is alive and these things just you need to be seen by us

 

Jason McSparren: Can I ask you a question please?

 

Jo-Anne McArthur: Please

 

Jason McSparren: Could you expound a little bit on the idea of animals being sentient beings. Just to kind of give us a little bit of context for some people in our audience who may not actually understand what you're talking about or might need a little bit more background on that idea

 

Jo-Anne McArthur: Yeah all animals are feeling animals, they are complex and we aren't taught that they are complex, we are taught that they have complex emotional lives or that they make complex decisions and because they have these qualities, it means that they can experience complex emotions like joy and fear and sorrow and anxiety and jealousy. Some of these emotions I suppose are not complex but they do get complex and any of us who live with a cat or a dog or an animal know that they experience the world in us, all sorts of ways just as we do but so do the animals we eat now the pigs and the chickens and the turkeys and the cows and so because they can experience life as we do in many ways they can experience joy and suffering and fear. I think that needs to be known and it was really exciting is that ethology, the study of animal behavior is really growing and so you don't just have to take my word or the word of a dog owner that animals have feeling. We know this because they've been studied and we see incredible behaviors in fish, in insects, in chickens, and it's pretty exciting and so the more we know about how animals feel and think the more it becomes difficult for us to just or at least in theory should be more difficult for us to just put them away in cages that they can't turn around. In horrific fur farms where they're crammed into cages for our benefit especially when we don't need to do this, we don't need to keep animals in these conditions for our survival.

 

Jason McSparren: Great and that actually prompts another question, again just why is it important to make these animals visible, you mentioned these hidden animals with whom humans have such a close relationship and yet humans fail to see these animals.You mention the animals that we eat, the animals that we wear, we use for research, sometimes we put these animals to work,we view them as entertainment as we can see on the screen right now and also the animals that we sacrifice in the name of tradition and religion and you started to talk about that already, but I'd like if you can just elaborate on that a little bit more why is it important for the general public to see these animals.

 

Jo-Anne McArthur: Well as the old saying goes, I guess seeing is believing and sometimes we have to see something to become aware of it. It's really that simple and that is the job of photojournalists, photographers and not just animal photojournalists like myself but conflict photographers for example, they are going out into the field to document wars, the things that we do to one another,we need to take what's going on in the world and bring that home and literally bring that into our homes where we're sitting right now, so that we can learn something new and as we know that should and often does lead to conversations and caring and change. Photographers create proof and that's what we're doing here with hidden, this is proof of what is, what needs to be seen and in most of these cases probably all of these cases what should not be. These images don't sugarcoat how we treat animals, it's a five-pound tome of a book and it is modeled after other books of war photography, about how we treat others and long ago I was inspired by war photographers to do something similar for animals. I felt that other animals, non-human animals deserved the visibility that we attempt to give to other suffering people, other suffering animals I guess.

 

Jason McSparren: Sure, no I totally agree. It's really one of those things as you say you know they're unseen. right, but we interact with animals constantly. In the real life the whole idea of the unseen, we talk about industrial farming etc, even we're seeing in some of these images it's not necessarily even industrial farming. It's small community farming, it's just subsistence living in some cases but the way that we interact with these animals, the way that we may take their lives prior to eating them, etc, it seems to be a pretty brutal life for these animals and the more that people know it could change people's attitudes toward their diets, it could also possibly even improve the lives of the food animals, etc and also the animals that we see in entertainment and things along those lines. So at this point, I just like to mention that folks you can take a look at the Green Institute website for a lot of features and activities. It's https://greeninstitute.ng/. And one of the things that you might be able to find there is this really interesting book, the Principles of Green and Sustainable Science written by the Director of the Green Institute and Founder Adenike Akinsemolu. This book focuses on the Principles of Green and Sustainable Science using various case studies that it contributes to the literature in science, in the environmental fields by providing information on scientific aspects of sustainability. So the Principles of Green and Sustainability Science can be found at the greeninstitute.ng. And as we move on, Jo-Anne I'd like to ask you, many of our audience members are maybe aspiring photographers or maybe just college age people thinking about how they can contribute to the world or how they might be able to build a career. So I ask you what motivated you to pursue this subject matter for your artistic expression and professional focus

 

Jo-Anne McArthur: Well there certainly wasn't to be lying there. I'm just someone who was really interested in the world and also very interested in suffering and the causes of suffering and when I saw that there were these billions of animals that we just weren't thinking about I became really gripped by this, very curious and started turning my lens away from the other things I was photographing, street photography and humanitarian causes towards animals and sometimes I could just go down the street and photograph the animals coming to the slaughterhouse. Sometimes I traveled farther fields, sometimes I went to a local circus rodeo or zoo and something interesting about using this word hidden. Sometimes it's not just the animals that are literally hidden but their uses and their experiences are hidden to us so what I mean by that is, for example, in circuses and zoos the animals are in plain view they're not hidden at all but we aren't really seeing them. We're there for our enjoyment, our education, sometimes it's just you know a day out for something to do and yet while the animal is right in front of us we aren't really thinking about them, wearen't thinking about their experience, how they might feel about having to perform, how they might have felt about being broken in order to perform and so their lives even though right there in front of us remain hidden as well and that was actually the subject of my second book called captive which is a look atanimals in zoos and aquaria worldwide.

 

Jason McSparren: Yes I hope to have time to focus on that as well

 

Jo-Anne McArthur: Yes

Favourite Quote

“Well as the old saying goes, I guess seeing is believing and sometimes we have to see something to become aware of it.”
— Jo-Anne McArthur

Top Comments

Thank you for showing us. It is an eye opener to cruety faced by the animals that we refused to be aware of- Anonymous

THE GREEN ROOM (Episode 11): Amelia Clarke on Collaboration not Competition (Building Multi-stakeholder Partnerships for Sustainability)

GREEN ROOM: LIVE WEBINAR

Summary of the Discussion

Dr. Amelia shared her research work which focuses on Implementation of goals through different approach which can be partnership or participation. She further speaks on the importance of localising the Sustainable Development Goals and the deep Decarbonization strategy which is also  crucial in achieving the Global Goals.

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ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Dr. Amelia Clarke is the Associate Dean Research in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Waterloo.

Dr. Amelia Clarke is the Associate Dean Research in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Waterloo.

ABOUT THE MODERATOR

Dr. Jason J. McSparren is an educator, researcher, and administrator with a PhD. in Global Governance and Human Security from Massachusetts Boston.

Dr. Jason J. McSparren is an educator, researcher, and administrator with a PhD. in Global Governance and Human Security from Massachusetts Boston.

Q&A

Dr. McSparren: Fantastic work. Thank you very much. Thank you very, very much. Okay, I'd like to begin now with the question and answer period. Okay, again, ladies and gentlemen in the audience, if you're interested in asking a question, please raise your hand or type your question into the chatbox. And then, we will call on you unmute your screen so that you can ask your question, or if you prefer if it's in the chat box, I can always ask.

But as I was listening to the presentation. One thing came to mind that that jumped out on me. Actually, there are a lot of very interesting details. This is a really fantastic research; it can have a big impact on sustainable development progress and the actualisation of the SDGs going forward. So that's really great work. I want to commend the two of you. But one thing that I thought about really quickly is, you mentioned, Dr. Clarke, that you have some of these multi-stakeholder group projects are either voluntarily put together or they are contract-based. And I was wondering if in your conclusions in your findings. Did you find that one or the other is more successful, or was that something that you weren't necessarily looking at?

Dr. Clarke: So what we're finding is that at the local scale, they're all relevant.And so then it's a question for what.So generally, organisations get involved with a partnership approach because they've, they want to tackle something that's outside their jurisdiction, or they don't have the resources to do it.And so that drives them to want to partner with someone else. So, if the main resource you're missing is capital, don't have the money to do an infrastructure project for example, then a PPP might be the right approach. On the other hand, if you're missing kind of collective action by many actors simultaneously. And you want to move forward on a lot of aspects because these are very complicated problems. Then a multi-stakeholder kind of cross sector partnership will enable you to engage many actors from local universities to local businesses to civil society, to all collectively work towards the same vision. So, each one has a purpose. And what we're seeing in the climate spaces now there's a lot of sector approaches. So they're starting to develop partnerships very specific on transportation, for example. And then another one over here on electricity. So, again, it depends on what you're missing right how much do you control the local utilities or it's another company. How much needs to be done through partnership or how much you can do yourself.

Dr. McSparren: Yes, interesting I asked that question because in some of my research, I've looked at voluntary governance mechanisms in the mining sector, and again in the literature, there's a lot of talk about the effectiveness or sometimes lack thereof. And those so I'll just kind of wondering about your perspective in the sustainability front.

Dr. Clarke: I'm glad you brought up mining. So, this is a perfect example of a participation approach versus a partnership approach. And if you're doing stakeholder engagement, but you completely control their decision, and you're going to completely implement all the decisions that's not collaborative right, where if it's a partnership approach where you let the community have a big say in what's happening here. Then you're starting to get into a more partnership approach.

Favourite Quote

“The Sustainable Community plans are a wonderful way of localizing the SDGs and bringing those topics all down to local scale and what can be achieved at the local scale.”
— Dr. Amelia Clarke

Top Comments

I am very appreciative by the insightful information shared by both Professor Clarke and by Mr. Bayo at today's Green Room event-Filomena