New year, new face at KLA. We are thrilled to welcome Kari Hewitt to the KLA Team as Director of
Kari will hit the ground running leading our work with the State of Delaware in developing their Climate Action Plan, supporting our MVP action grant clients in Massachusetts, and continuing to expand our reach throughout the country.
Many of you already know Kari and will share our excitement about adding her expertise and energy at this critical time. For those who will just now have the pleasure of working with her, I did a quick Q&A with Kari so you could hear from her in her own words.
How did you get into this line of work?
If you had to choose one topic that gets you out of bed and fired up every day, what would it be and why?
Well, it's hard to choose just one thing. I guess climate change as a big picture issue. On a more specific
Why make the move to KLA now?
There is no challenge we're facing greater than climate change. This next decade will be critical in our efforts to reverse trends and curb the worst outcomes of climate change. It is personally very important to me to work with a group of colleagues that are unapologetically passionate about and committed to social justice, sustainability, and climate action in all the work that they do. And I know this KLA team will be just that.
What challenges and/or opportunities and/or specific projects are you most looking forward to tackling at KLA?
When you think about our work with cities on climate and sustainability, what experiences and expertise will you tap?
I think I am bringing an interesting mix of experience to the work at KLA. In addition to having spent the past decade working on local government climate and sustainability plans, I've also had the opportunity to work with a variety of sectors and project types focused on sustainable and resilient planning, design, implementation, and decision-making to support continuous improvement. I've worked with local governments, state agencies, airports, transit agencies, private developers, and spent the last 5 years leading a corporate sustainability program.
Stakeholder engagement processes and utilizing applied technology solutions have been a common thread in all of this work and will continue to be in my work with KLA.
I think I'm also bringing a unique understanding of how planning plays out in implementation. I've been
I've been actively engaged with the Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure, including sitting on their Envision Review Board for the past 4 years. This experience has taught me a lot about how community-scale sustainability plans play out at the project scale. Increasingly we will need to bridge silos between departments, agencies, communities, and leverage resources to tackle major challenges associated with a changing climate and growing population. I see an important need to build more strategic partnerships among those working on these issues at all scales and am hopeful I can bring my experience and insights to helping make that happen.
Finally, I see myself as an educator in all the work that I do, and in fact, do teach (and will be teaching this semester at Tufts University). I really enjoy this aspect of my work - having the opportunity to both train others and share practical experiences, but also learn from students and colleagues and staying on top of new ideas and approaches in the field.