You are my why

Catherine Cruveillier is a French-American sustainable development pioneer and leader, both as a theorist and a practitioner, with over forty years of experience, of which ten as a certified Leadership Coach. She helps corporations grow responsibly by trading abstract jargon for actionable clarity. She does that by having mindful (Socratic) group conversations with them, in which she questions their words until a crystal-clear image emerges, that all can see and immediately make happen.

Before playing Socrates, she worked for private companies, environmental organizations, and international organizations in the food, agriculture, tourism, finance, and nature conservation industries. In the 80s, while working in Brazil for the United Nations Development Program, she was part of the teams who contributed to defining the concept of “sustainable development,” by making it a reality on the ground through pioneering projects, particularly in the Amazon. She never stopped refining the concept and its field applications ever since.

Catherine knows what “sustainability” actually looks, sounds, feels, tastes, and smells like. She also knows that the curious child in each one of us, unencumbered by intellectualism, can learn it faster than the biased, and often arrogant, adults we have become.

While at The World Bank in the 90s, she helped African governments hold participatory processes to define and implement their first Environmental Action Plans. She designed and managed some of the first large biodiversity conservation projects financed by the Global Environment Fund (GEF), then in its pilot phase. While at the International Finance Corporation, with a handful of other pioneers in partner organizations, she developed the emerging “biodiversity and business” industry, and led some of the first investments in green funds and new business models that make profit from protecting nature instead of destroying it. She contributed to international policy-making processes and entities—particularly the Convention on Biological Diversity, and the European biodiversity policy—for several years. She also co-led the development of global multi-stakeholder sustainability certification bodies, and the establishment of sustainability standards that are now used worldwide.