Impact Interview: Angela Loder
Name: Angela Loder
Role/Function: Founder and Executive Director, Greening the City and Adjunct Professor, University of Colorado at Boulder
What are you working on these days?
As a well-being and nature scientist, I help organizations understand how people and places thrive, with a particular focus on connecting regenerative sustainability with workplace performance, social value and impact. My work spans from urban planning to biophilic design to healthy buildings, and is grounded in the underlying values and experiences of place that impact health, well-being, equity and project success. I recently started teaching this to design students and I’m thrilled to be applying this to community co-design and regenerative leadership as part of urban resilience strategies. I’m particularly excited to bring somatic nervous system work to clients (and students) as a game-changing addition to regenerative approaches and sustainable health and well-being.
What was the “aha” moment that sparked your interest in social and environmental impact?
As a child I was lucky to have traveled to Europe to see family so I knew that we could do better in North America than the car-oriented, soulless suburbs I grew up in. I also recognized the disconnect between the vitality and creativity of nature and the depressing dominant narrative of sustainability, which traditionally stopped at “do less harm.” Not exactly inspiring. The last piece of the puzzle for me was recognizing that many well-intentioned urban greening and community projects never actually asked the people these projects were meant to help how they felt about it, missing key social values and context that impacted a project’s success. This started my journey through academia and then into consulting and the International WELL Building Institute, where I continued pushing back on assumptions about what we could do to support thriving places and people. I keep pushing these boundaries now by grounding in regenerative design and thinking over traditional sustainability, and using a whole-body-mind approach.
How did you break into the impact space? What career advice would you give to professionals who are just starting out or looking to transition?
Despite our pretensions, we are social animals who rely on face-to-face contact and connection to work together. All of my work has been through working with and meeting people in-person or now virtually, and in particular getting to know the full person. If someone is still in school, I'd recommend trying to get an internship as part of your degree and if already working, finding groups like Reconsidered to network and connect. Another option is to look at people whose career you admire and see what groups, education and associations they are part of.
Working in 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?
I've never been content with the status quo and have always chosen the less well-traveled path. This allows me to balance asking the big questions like “what makes people thrive?”, for which there may not be “research evidence” yet, with evidenced-based data on what we DO know. This allows me to think outside of current system boundaries but be grounded in evidenced-based impact. Doing a PhD definitely helped me hone those skills but over the years I've also added in a different kind of listening and knowing that comes from my creative background and nervous system work. This allows me to use head AND heart which is so essential for impact work.
What most excites you about the impact space right now?
While I am still hesitant about all the implications of AI for our work, especially around equity, I've seen it be used for some incredible projects that are making the 'counting' part of sustainability more manageable and freeing up people to do the creative problem-solving that they're best at. For example, I've seen cases where there isn't the time or money to hire ten ecologists for six months, but AI can do a biological diversity sweep with a 95% accuracy very quickly and make meeting biodiversity protection targets seem much more manageable. I am also thrilled to see more attention on regenerative approaches which can help us get out of the ‘sustainability is just accounting’ mindset that has been taking over many sustainability and impact jobs.
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