By Nazanin Zargaran, Gustavson External Relations co-op student
Cayra Tansey, fourth-year BCom student, has long had her sights set on being a corporate sustainability consultant to do her part in preventing businesses from harming their communities and environments. “With my business degree, I was given the tools to look at sustainability as a systemic problem and one that large corporations have always been a major part of,” says Cayra, who has recently felt compelled to zoom in on the problem a bit further – which led to her summer entrepreneurship project.
“I became frustrated as I couldn’t find resources that were building up the next generation of leaders with a focus on social and environmental sustainability. I saw an opportunity to look at the individuals, the young people like myself, who are going to be the ones in charge pretty soon. So I thought, why not start at the root and build great sustainability leaders? With lots of event-planning experience, my mind immediately went to workshops and conferences and it grew a bit from there.”
And so Every Leader Sustainability Education (ELSE), a non-profit focused on sustainability education, was born. Cayra worked with the Coast Capital Savings Innovation Centre on campus last semester, and is now working to launch the organization during her entrepreneurship specialization this summer with her co-founder and friend, Clio Hofler, also a fourth-year BCom student.
Sustainability has inspired Cayra’s life and career for a long time, and she has taken environmental studies classes along with her commerce degree. ‘’I have always been interested in the connection between sustainability and business,’’ says Cayra, “but I also love to educate and work with youth.” She saw two of her passions combine when she thought about starting an organization “to educate young adults about sustainable choices and leadership when they are at a critical age with newfound independence.”
“In university, I’ve been lucky to have access to more technical and complex sustainability research, but not everyone is privileged enough to have access to these materials,” says Cayra. She wants to provide accessible and action-oriented education for those who are wanting to learn about sustainability. She hopes ELSE will not only provide access to information but also provide a community to connect people with a shared vision.
“I came to business school mostly because I did not know what exactly I wanted to do, but I knew that if I could combine a base understanding of commerce with any of my passions, I could create meaningful work for myself,” she says. Entrepreneurship and sustainability courses while studying her BCom boosted her skills to think critically about the business world in general. “Sometimes you do not realize how much you have learned until leaving the class.” Learning about communication and leadership has also been helpful for Cayra as she charts her future path.
The non-profit organization that Cayra and Clio envision is two-fold. The first element is a series of public conferences and workshops for young adults in their first few years of independence. “These live events will feature experts from different areas of social and environmental sustainability sharing their knowledge and advice in an actionable way,” she says. The second focus of her non-profit is a secondary school workshop program that engages youth to think about the ways their lives intersect with sustainability.
The big goal for Cayra is to connect with educational institutions and reach as many people as possible. She wants youth and young adults to feel empowered to take action in their own lives. “I want 15 to 25-year-olds to feel educated about sustainability challenges and then feel empowered to address those problems in their futures,” says Cayra. “Getting to the point where all young adults in BC have some form of a sustainability lens to view the world through is my goal. I’d like to help create a world where our future leaders are equipped with the knowledge and compassion needed to face these challenges.”
Cayra sums up with this statement about the initiative and her passion for the subject:
“When you ask yourself how we’re going to solve the greatest challenges of our time, I say: What ELSE, but education? When ELSE, but now? and who ELSE, but our future leaders?”
