Meet the team! – Zoe Greenwood, Co-Founder and Development Director

Zoe is a Co-Founder and Development Director of the Climate Change Coaches. She lives in Oxford with her family. Before joining Climate Change Coaches in 2028, she spent 12 years with the NGO, Earthwatch, where she built and delivered award winning climate leadership programmes. Following this, Zoe led the growth of the environment practice area at the leadership consultancy, Oxford HR, where she still works alongside the Climate Change Coaches.

Zoe has been working in and around climate change since 2004 and feels lucky to have been in contexts where she’s needed to understand it and explain it in simple terms, as part of education programmes. She’s seen how the public mood around climate has shifted over the years. However, the motivator for her working is a love of the natural world and her children. ‘Working on the topic requires a bit of sticking power, it would be lovely to be able to forget about the fact we’re experiencing a climate emergency’, says Zoe. ‘For me, it must be associated with making a greener, healthier life for people and its intricately connected to justice and wellbeing. Everything is interconnected and that is probably the biggest realisation I have had in my career when it comes to how we talk about climate change’.

For Zoe this is why the B Corporation movement is so important. ‘We’ve always talked about businesses being part of the solution, but B Corp actually puts business as a force for good front and centre. This is not a side project; it is embedded in the whole ethos’ she explains, ‘just imagine if this was the way all businesses operated’. It was always an ambition to be a B Corporation for the Climate Change Coaches.

‘From the very beginning, we built our business to drive meaningful change, helping individuals and organisations navigate the complex emotions and challenges of the green transition and Charly always had B Corp firmly in her sights and led us through a very intricate process to get there, I have so much admiration for her holding it front and centre, when it would have been easy to put it on the back burner’, Zoe reflects.

‘Furthermore, being in a B Corp community feels good as there is a support network, which is important for all of us, and especially small businesses’, Zoe goes on to say. ‘We are trying to do something quite unique at the Climate Change Coaches in driving change for the green and just transition from behind, through the people who are out there day in and day out influencing others in a world that is increasingly not interested, and sometimes that can be lonely.’

‘We believe we cannot make the changes we need to as a society without human kindness and connection, and coaching skills can be core to that’.

Being involved in the Climate Change Coaches brings joy and challenge every single day for Zoe, and she has seen the organisation unfurl and move through different stages of growth and impact. ‘We have so much more work to do in the world. This is a team of people who are committed to positive impact, learning together and leaving a lasting legacy, we are just getting started.’