Impact Interview: Allison Reser

Name: Allison Reser

Role/Function: Director of Sustainability and Innovation, Pet Sustainability Coalition

What are you working on these days?

Last month I stepped up into a new role at the Pet Sustainability Coalition (PSC) — I’m now the Director of Sustainability and Innovation. This is my first director-level job and every day I catch myself with a big, open-mouth smile showing my amazement to be trusted to guide the strategic vision for sustainability in the pet industry. I’m working on elevating my leadership skills and continuing to show up to work confidently and with creativity. On my task list is webinar content for the year, dreaming up the levers we can pull to incentivize positive impact with our member companies and prepping to form cohorts and working groups where possible competitors can collaborate to create industry-wide change. All through the lens of PSC’s focus areas of packaging, ingredients and social impact (read more about my take on these focus areas here).

What was the “aha” moment that sparked your interest in social and environmental impact? 

In my case, the apple didn’t fall too far from the tree; I learned many of my environmental, nature-based and inclusive values from my parents. A series of events in middle school helped me know my career would be in the impact space. One day in science class my teacher showed An Inconvenient Truth. It rocked my world. “What?? What do you mean that just by EXISTING, I, as a human, am destroying the nature that I love??” It became even more real when I noticed a glacier at my favorite backpacking spot was a lot smaller than it had been the year before.

After internalizing that climate change is real and awful as a pre-teen, I struggled with sadness and fear. Luckily my aunt worked at the fancy new (at the time) EPA building in Denver. I took a tour with her and saw that people were working to fix some of the issues that Al Gore had explained to me. My fear was soothed knowing that I wasn’t the only person who cared about this stuff and that obviously I was going to become one of these changemakers when I grew up.

Now, as a grown-up, my interest in social and environmental impact only gets stronger the deeper I get. I feel lucky that I have 40 hours a week dedicated to something that matters.

How did you break into the impact space? What career advice would you give to professionals who are just starting out or looking to transition?

In 2015 after being part of the first-ever graduating class with an “Ecosystem Science and Sustainability” degree from Colorado State University, I tried searching “sustainability jobs”. I got NOTHING. It was super frustrating and I felt jealous of people who got a biology degree and could become a biologist or people who studied finance could look for jobs at banks. There wasn’t an obvious career roadmap I could follow for social and environmental impact.

I expanded my search terms to find organizations making some sort of impact I was interested in then looked for roles at those places I was qualified for. This scrappy method, plus some persistent networking, landed me my first job at The Alliance Center, a coworking space dedicated to bringing environmental organizations together, as a front desk reception/community event planner.

The great news is that things have changed a lot in the nine years since I entered the workforce and “sustainability” is now a fruitful search term. But some of the same questions persist: Would you rather work for an organization with a strong impact mission in a job role that might feel a little disconnected from that mission OR be in a specific sustainability-focused role at a company that day-to-day isn’t necessarily focused on positive impact? Or perhaps, you would rather be like a secret agent and choose a role at an unsustainable company and try to be an internal advocate?

All are good options. My main advice to answer these questions for yourself is to do a ton of informational interviews (I volunteer! Schedule time with me).

Working in impact is often about driving change. What is the skill or trait that has been most important for your work as a change agent? How did you learn or hone it?

Building trust. I appreciate the self-reflection involved in this question. It's helped me realize that all the opportunities I’ve had to make a change came because the people around me trusted me and came with me along the path of change. Most recently, for example, the promotion I mentioned in the first question indicates that the hiring committee must trust me with this new responsibility.

When I think about the people I trust most a few qualities come to mind: They do things when they say they’ll do them. They communicate directly and speak their mind whether it’s a strong opinion or admitting they don’t know and need help. They are authentically committed to the success of their work. They listen.

What most excites you about the impact space right now?

Right now I’m excited about data. A few of PSC’s members have mentioned to me that they need data in order to make a decision about their business. And wow, that warms my heart - let’s all be making more data-driven decisions in the impact space.

Conversations about data bring us back to a scientific grounding of why environmental impact matters. Humans are affecting habitats, ecosystems, and the whole biome in ways that change the cycles of energy, water, rocks, and nutrients upon which life depends. For example, when a company wants impact data for one ingredient over another to inform their formulation, it shows they are acknowledging their cascading externalities and incorporating the moral imperative to do better into their business.

Cheers to the scientists and researchers who are building the databases that we need to create a positive impact!

Now, I think we need to work on those paywalls and proprietariness. How can we make impact data, like for a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), open-source to decision makers while also financially supporting those who are populating and validating the data? I don’t have the answer to that question, but I’m exploring how a nonprofit industry association like PSC could make this possible — let me know if you have ideas!

This season, our Impact Interviews series features members of the Change Hub, our membership community for busy sustainable business professionals. Tap into trainings, tools and a trusted network of fellow impact practitioners (including Allison!) by JOINING US HERE.