Lifting voices in her hometown fulfills her professional purpose

Jenny came to Deloitte nearly three years ago from a small social impact strategy consulting firm, but she was looking to make a larger sustainable impact. Her passion for collective action, and understanding of stakeholder engagement, drew her to the possibilities at Deloitte.

“My work draws on what I was doing beforehand, but by working for a larger organization with Deloitte’s commitments and scale, I feel that I’m able to touch social impact more broadly,” she says. Jenny’s primary focus is around collective action: prioritizing stakeholder engagement, lifting community voices, and creating relationships across a system. “I’m calling it purpose ecosystems,” she says. A dozen years ago, when she began her career, a path for her didn’t necessarily exist. “It’s definitely been a lot of work in the making – the idea that you can weave your values into the work that you do,” she says. She received a sustainable MBA. “My program felt that the business sector would have to play a role for any of this change to happen, but it took a while to carve out space for jobs that sat at the intersection of business and sustainability,” she says. “I think if I hadn’t made the move to Deloitte, I wouldn’t have manifested this dream.”

Through her experience at Deloitte, Jenny became deeply embedded in the Yes San Francisco (SF), Urban Sustainability Challenge, a collaboration between Deloitte, Salesforce, CitiGroup, and the World Economic Forum that works to make cities more inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable.

The initiative launched on Deloitte’s annual national day of volunteer service in 2023, which is referred to as Impact Day, and for 2024, the work is to deepen its impact, grow its purpose ecosystem further, and use the blueprint of Yes SF to expand the model to other cities across the globe, called Yes Cities. A second challenge will also be announced, broadening Yes SF’s scope.

“We always wanted this work to continue and not just go in and go out,” Jenny says. “With this second challenge, the goal is to support more sustainability innovators and their solutions in San Francisco, and to increase the energy in that space.” The San Francisco Chamber of Commerce and other local organizations have played a major role in the Yes SF collaboration and are working on initiatives to sustain the solutions for the long term, including locating a physical workspace for these innovators.

For Jenny, this work is about connecting people and organizations with shared purpose and building those networks. It’s also personal for her: she was born and raised in San Francisco and worked early in her career with local school districts and community organizations to drive long-term visioning strategies. “As we do this work, we know the biggest social impact problems won’t be solved by just one organization,” she says. “It takes a network.”

“In graduate school, I was thinking about how important cities are to the sustainability movement, how to build services around people, decrease our carbon footprint, which communities are most impacted by climate change,” Jenny says. “And then, how are we bringing people in together at different levels, and how are we guided by local voices?” For Jenny, working on Yes SF, and the broader Yes Cities initiative, brings together all those threads. “I never thought in my wildest dreams that I would be able to touch something like this initiative,” she says. “It’s been so exciting, so energizing, and so fulfilling.”