Employee Spotlight – Velina, Chief of impact

After working remotely from London for a year with us as an expert impact advisor, Vélina finally decided to pack up her bags and join us in Montreal. She’s our Chief of Impact. If today we can claim to be experts at impact measuring and tracking, this is largely due to Velina.

What is your background, experience and expertise (school, jobs)?

I am specialized in sustainable development, first to help multinational firms and investment funds reducing their negative impacts on both humans and planet. At some point, It felt incomplete, so I trained myself to the Impact Measurement Theory. Which made me realize how much positive impact on the world NGOs and social entrepreneurship can have. Unity is strength, and by gathering all these actors of change together to move in the same direction, the result is impak!

 

What motivates you to wake up and go to work in the morning?

Feeling the special energy of our united team who wants to make a difference in the world.

 

If you were an eco-friendly item?

Oh, I’m afraid to sound like the company’s hippie :  a seed. Seeds represent the durability of a genetic legacy that should not be a corporate property. Today, most of the traded plant species are regulated or even are corporate properties. We, as humans, only eat a very limited selection of fruits, vegetables and herbs: have you ever noticed that we eat 5 to 10 different types of apple and only a single kind of banana? It is no coincidence but rather a conscious choice dictated by financial interests. Not only does it creates food poverty, but it also contributes to drain our biodiversity, by relying on  monoculturetree planting which makes our ecosystem vulnerable, then we try to fix this with pesticides which only makes things worse, etc… such an awful vicious circle. #facepalm

 

If you had to choose a SINGLE social cause :

Nature and life protection.. I would even go further: the regeneration of nature and the living, which is possible, if we mimic the way nature works. Nature is using what she needs to live and grow, and focus its efforts on creating wealth for its whole ecosystem. For instance, when cultivating with a permaculture system, not only can we supply our food needs, in a more productive and healthy way than traditional farming, but we can also support our ecosystems by providing them with more fertile soils (from capturing CO2, saving water and creating biodiversity habitats). In retrospect, I wish us, humans, could understand that we are not above every other living organism in this world, in fact we all are part of it and our futures both are closely tied together.

Nature doesn’t simply exist to fill human’s needs. We need to serve the nature back if we want to thrive together. This include having more consideration for the well-being of animals too. To me, this is central to ensure a good understanding of this major stake: the lack of empathy towards sensitive animals (whose suffering is visible) is an obvious symptom of our society’s anthropocentrism.

If you were a slogan or a quote ?

If climate was a bank, we would have saved it a long time ago.


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