Upon starting my last semester in my graduate school journey, I realized I want to take any opportunities that not only will hone my hard skills but also will harness my soft skills as well. After spending the past two semesters trying to figure out what niche I wanted to focus on and how I will navigate my career after graduation. Having a professional background in accounting and finance for 7+ years have developed my interests to grow into sustainable and climate finance and investment. While I’m at the Sustainability Management program at Columbia University, I learned that sustainable development and the pathway to net zero approach needs to be addressed at the system level to make sure we’re doing it right and holistically. With the various key multi-stakeholders, it’s crucial to apply system thinking, thought leadership, and stewardship to solve the huge challenges to build greener and more sustainable future ahead.
Coming to this concept, I realize that to do systemic changes efficiently and effectively, we need to think about how investment can help advancing the systematic changes required. To engage and manage multi-stakeholders from very various backgrounds will become crucial, a very challenging yet very rewarding one. Investing in the regenerative growth has been one of the key solutions to drive sustainable and circular growth that I’m looking at.
In this occasion, I have the opportunity to work with one of the SIRC client who is not only focuses on regenerative agriculture but also a pioneer in system-level investing. From a corporate investment, system-level investing is a very interesting concept to me even though I’m still not familiar about what it is. After spending a few weeks doing preliminary research on system -level investing and the client’s approach towards reforestation, I learned that to regenerative agriculture tackles many environmental, social, and economical issues all at the same time. By doing regenerative agriculture, we do the reverse logic of how we’ve been doing the agriculture business all these years. We used to think how and what we should plant to fulfill the market demands. However, regenerative agriculture starts from what the forest or the plantation is giving out the fruits. We follow their timing instead of using our timing and demands to do the forest management and planning. We try to move in rhythm and in sync with the flow of nature. I think it’s wonderful in a way it really echoes the message of co-existing with all the living things harmoniously, which I firmly believe is the ultimate goal of living a great life.
I’m excited to learn more about it as the time goes with SIRC. This opportunity not only gives me new lessons but also expand my horizon. I hope this could mark the start of my career after graduation in system-level investing landscape.