Impact Interview: Julie Verdugo

Name: Julie Verdugo

Role/Function: Head of Sustainability & Social Impact, Urban Outfitters & Free People, URBN Inc

What are you working on these days?

I’m currently leading Sustainability and Social Impact at Urban Outfitters and Free People (at URBN Inc) and we just got our second Impact Report out the door, a labor of love! I’ve been excited to see our CSR team grow exponentially over the past few years, and with that, we’ve been able to grow our work even more intersectionally. We’ve been trying to build out intersectional projects that help us rethink our supply chain, and a project I’m still feeling the buzz from is a cultural appreciation training we recently hosted for our product teams across brands with the wonderful nonprofit Mercado Global, a nonprofit I’ve been collaborating with for years. This training took our designers to the artisan workshops in Lake Atitlan, Guatemala. This sort of exposure helps shift the understanding of the origin of craft and grows an understanding of giving credit where it is truly due.

Outside of my 9 to 5 world, I’ve been sustainably refurbishing an 1880s farmhouse with my husband in the Catskills– he’s an architectural designer who actually knows what he’s doing in this space! We’ve decided to treat it as thoughtfully and lovingly as we can – working within adaptive reuse everywhere we can, building with wood from trees we had to take down on our property, milled up the road, and now supporting the home’s foundation, using limewash and naturally tinted linseed oils instead of paints on the walls and exterior, solar energy… it’s certainly been a humbling and cathartic project and one that’s helped inform my work in the field as well, if not a lesson that thoughtful, impactful work takes time.

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

My first degree in Industrial and Operations Engineering, essentially the study of product creation and managing its resulting waste, led me to factories around the world very early in my career. As a result, I had the incredible opportunity to live and work in factory towns on the outskirts of major cities around the world (from Turkey to Argentina to Germany to the States).

When I was stationed in a rural factory town in Argentina running a production cell producing water pumps for cars, fully immersed in the community, friends with the team working in the factory, I started to open my eyes to how the factory affected the daily lives of my new friends and colleagues — their air quality, their water streams and their health in some cases. I developed a deep sense questioning of our greater supply chain system, this time with an added human lens, and a lack of patience for the way things were being done. I couldn’t unsee what I had experienced and made a pact with myself to use that exposure to help drive change in a space that needed it.

How did you break into the social impact space?

After my experience working in factories, I knew that I wanted to use my skills to help drive the change that I wasn’t seeing. Still, at the time there were few if any formal positions in the sustainability and impact space, so I decided to start carving out opportunities, right from where I was. I realized that opportunities were all around me in the work I was already doing and sought out mentors who were compassionate enough to listen to my quest for answers, and my crazy ideas, and helped open doors that I certainly couldn’t have opened on my own to begin to drive change within larger organizations.

My first larger-scale example was while I was at Adidas in their global MBA rotational program. At the German headquarters and overwhelmed with the idea of driving change all on my own at this massive corporation, I will never forget the space that my mentor created for me to help us bring their first social impact product line to life — an accessories line that drove the creation of arts classes in the favelas of Rio during the Rio 2016 Olympics. Once I saw what was possible, and at scale, I knew my path was already written.

Working in social 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?

Utilizing data to create a business case for impact has been crucial to any progress I've been able to drive. I grew up as a numbers nerd who loved math and science and noticed that I was leaving that behind in my early professional days of passion-driven impact work and it wasn't necessarily helping to drive change at scale.

As I attempted to drive change within large organizations that weren't necessarily created through a lens of impact, I realized that doing the numbers and developing a business case created the opportunity to speak the same language as key decision-makers and have my ideas actually listened to. I used these skills when pitching to start our first semblance of a Sustainability and Social Impact team at Free People five years ago, and have seen the value to impact that a full business picture approach carries.

Oftentimes it's the passion and emotion that drives our work, but I've learned it's the preparedness on the numbers side that can open up the conversations that lead to impact at scale.

What most excites you about the social impact space right now?

I’m most excited and inspired by the ideas I’m hearing from students. The youth truly represent the voice of what’s coming and actually what is inevitably already here! I stay close to students through constant classroom collaboration, mentorship, case study co-creation, guest lecturing and sitting on the board of a number of nonprofits uplifting youth around the world (LIM College, Girls Inc, Cuba Skate).

This is a generation that so natively and effortlessly utilizes creativity to speak their mind and express ideas in so many intersecting concepts — from race, ability, gender, and environment — that seem so nuanced and complex for older, more seasoned professionals. Staying close to students also keeps me optimistic for the changemakers that will be leading us one day soon, and keeps my inner impact spark lit.

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