2025 PRME Education Award

Since 2012, I have led a decade-plus experiment creating an MBA curriculum focused on putting social and environmental mission and sustainability first, and having financial success follow. Students are introduced to the SDG framework in the first session of their first class: Principles of Sustainable Management. Because of our focus on “business for good”, all of our classes, and all student projects, address SDG issues: from climate, to gender equity, to life below water, to sustainable production and consumption. We now have hundreds of alums doing great work in the world advancing the SDGs, and through the creation of a durable and financially successful new business school, there will be thousands more to come.

Bard’s program is focused on a broad definition of sustainability: “Shared Well-Being on a Healthy Planet”, emphasizing equally the social and ecological dimensions.[1] We train our graduates to build and transform businesses to make measurable and continuous progress in substantially reducing environmental footprint, while also treating workers, customers, suppliers and communities with greater justice and equity.

Our curriculum begins with an integrated, sixty-credit curriculum with a strong central core. The curriculum is divided among nineteen semester-long classes, in turn organized around three verticals: (1) sustainability vision, (2) leadership, and (3) business execution. Our students need first to be able to see profitable business opportunities where others see social and environmental costs; second, they must be able to lead others towards that vision; and finally, they have to execute successfully against the sustainable business models they have advanced.

In addition, in fall 2020 the Bard MBA adopted a commitment to what we now call Justice in Impacts and Organizations (JOI) to prepare our future leaders to 1) build fully inclusive organizations and business models, with (2) a focus on effective leadership for racial and social equity within their organizations. Supported by training opportunities, faculty in almost all of our courses have reworked their curricula to consciously address these themes. In addition, in 2021, we introduced a unique summer pre-requisite for all incoming students focused on developing a common vocabulary upon entry into the program. There is no model for a business school integrating a focus on anti-racism across the curriculum, so ours has been an iterative learning journey on which we have made substantial progress. I have co-authored a working paper that describes how the curriculum has evolved to include a focus on racial equity and social justice.

[1] The Meadows Memorandum (2019) Well-Being Economy Alliance.

Our curriculum begins with an integrated, sixty-credit curriculum with a strong central core. The curriculum is divided among nineteen semester-long classes, in turn organized around three verticals: (1) sustainability vision, (2) leadership, and (3) business execution. Our students need first to be able to see profitable business opportunities where others see social and environmental costs; second, they must be able to lead others towards that vision; and finally, they have to execute successfully against the sustainable business models they have advanced.

Sustainability leadership requires an understanding of the advantages of mission-driven business in all functional areas: students must be able to see and execute on the business case in terms of lowered costs from lean and green operations, employee productivity and retention, authentic storytelling for stakeholder engagement, measuring what matters, gaining access to capital, strong partnerships, strategy development, and an innovation culture grounded in justice, equity, diversity and inclusion.

In addition to this strong core curriculum, we have a focus on carefully mentored experiential education. The Bard MBA begins with a two-semester six-credit consultancy, NYCLab, in which student teams address real world sustainability challenges. Recent clients have included JetBlue, Siemens Wind, Eileen Fisher, New York City Fleet, Target and McDonalds. At most schools, this would be considered a capstone-type experience, but at Bard, the course grounds the education from day one in real world experience. In addition to NYCLab, we emphasize student-driven innovation: all of our students must participate twice in our program-wide December pitch competition, Disrupt to Sustain, producing each year a festival of innovative ideas for tackling the SDGs. Students in their final year also complete a two-semester, six-credit, individually mentored capstone, that typically helps develop a career path postgraduation. Capstones follow four pathways: Entrepreneurial, Intrapreneurial, Consulting or Career Switching. Through NYCLab and Capstone, 12 credits or 20% of the curriculum, is devoted explicitly to experiential education.

Students do much of the learning from one another, and their career journeys while in the program. The classes are typically two-thirds women—very unusual for an MBA-- and around 40% of our students identify as non-white or first generation. In 2020 we instituted a generous scholarship program for first-generation and/or students from backgrounds historically marginalized in sustainability leadership, and about one-third of our students now receive these scholarships. Working on diverse teams is central to the student learning process.

The Bard MBA career journey is centered around an Individual Career Planning (ICP) process, in which either me or my MBA career Advisor meet with all of our students every semester in one-on-one career planning sessions. We offer a variety of mechanisms for students to build resume experience during the program, including consulting projects, internships, case competitions, and certificate completion. The career planning process must be individualized as our students head in multiple directions in terms of industry and SDG impact—from fashion to energy to food to finance—and function—from entrepreneurs to intrapreneurs, consultants and career switchers. These career journeys are the locus to develop many critical leadership skills.

I have had the privilege of creating, and then leading, an incredible community of faculty, students and staff as they have invented a new graduate educational program training business leaders for a purpose-focused economy. This work has been centered around five pillars:

Baked in, not bolted on. Sustainability business leaders need to seize sustainability revenue, cost and innovation advantages, across all functional areas of business. So all courses need to integrate a sustainability perspective.

Practitioner faculty. There is a large talent pool of intellectually engaged, experienced professionals, who are at the leading edge of sustainable business, and can create powerful faculties.

Experiential education. Sustainable business is a problem-solving discipline. Integrate project-based learning, consulting opportunities and real-world exercises wherever possible.

Individualized Career Support. Students have a variety of career interests in sectors ranging across fashion, food systems, finance, energy and more. Career success means working with students on a one-on-one basis, from vision to storytelling to networking and through the interview process.

Justice-Centered Culture. Young people committed to sustainability today rightly demand the training to support truly just and inclusive businesses upon graduation.

I have been very fortunate to be able to build the Bard MBA from the ground up, with a remarkably free-hand granted by a uniquely entrepreneurial institution. This has allowed me to largely sidestep common challenges that PRME colleagues have faced: silos, turf battles, irrelevant institutional requirements and bureaucratic obstacles. Nevertheless, we hope that Bard’s example can provide lessons for leaders at other institutions.