Finding the Right Mentality with Daniel Hill of EDF

This week, your host, Matt Barnes, sat down with Daniel Hill, Director of Business and Innovation at the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), to explore the raw truth of working in a heavily politicized environment like climate change.

the need for optimism

The climate change space is heavily politicized, and somewhat existential since it affects all aspects of life. To Daniel, this means you need an inherent optimism to maintain productivity. A similar situation is seen across the wider nonprofit sector.

For Daniel, the key to maintaining optimism is to work with other people, not just technology. Through this, he can witness individuals propose ideas, put them into action, see the results in real time, and gain a sense of fulfillment and satisfaction every time they take a new step forward.

At the end of the day, climate change is a human capital problem, so the key to fixing it is to get more people involved and caring about the situation. The only way to do that is to work with people to change their views.

“In terms of climate change, it's not a technology problem, it's not a finance problem, it's 100% a human capital problem. We need more people working on this, not with chief sustainability officer titles, but just more people finding ways to work on this in their jobs. And we need more people to care about this, which is even harder of a challenge. But we have everything we need. It's just we need people in the right places to actually put the things into motion, and that's just super hard because people are harsh.”

avoiding burnout

When you work in a heavily politicized environment, such as in the climate change sector, it’s easy to get overwhelmed with the negative news and end up burnt out and pessimistic about the future. If that happens, your work could be impacted and so it is best to avoid this situation.

Daniel advises avoiding content related to your work when you’re not actively working, so you can decompress. In fact, as well as refreshing your mindset, you may stumble upon processes and strategies that are used in other industries that could apply to your own, like behavioral change in psychology.

“There's usually a lot of really interesting things to learn from other industries or from other topics that can then be pulled into climate work that maybe people aren't thinking about.”

This way, you can bounce ideas off one another to ensure you consistently work towards your end goal.

Want more on finding the right mentality?

Listen to this episode of the Nonprofit Connect podcast to hear the rest of Daniel’s insights into remaining optimistic and productive!