Shaping Sustainable Economies with Elizabeth Schuster

As an environmental economist, Elizabeth Schuster helps conservation organizations solve complex challenges at the intersection of nature and communities. In this episode, Elizabeth describes how her firm, Sustainable Economies, applies systems-level thinking to messy, long-horizon environmental problems to turn them into clear, shared action. Her clients include watershed districts, non-profits, park districts, and various local and national environmental organizations. 

Hear how her strategies apply to any organization seeking to incorporate a sustainability and a community mindset into their work with examples from projects with The Cleveland Museum of Natural History, Franklin Park Conservatory and Botanical Gardens, and Summit County Metroparks. Elizabeth's advice? Set a clear North Star, listen across sectors, code what you hear, and write goals in language anyone can repeat. This process, which starts with stakeholder engagement, helps align conservation goals with community needs, often with surprising results. 

Clarity of purpose and effective internal and external communication are at the heart of any successful organization and are vitally important for organizations with social and environmental missions. Whatever your purpose, this episode provides tips on how to surface blind spots early and how to align staff so everyone rows in the same direction.

Learn More:

• Elizabeth Schuster, Partner and Environmental Economist, Sustainable Economies
• Projects and Clients

Transcript

Welcome And Listener Support

Diane Bickett, Host 0:04

You're listening to EcoSpeak CLE, a podcast for the Eco Curious in Northeast Ohio. My name is Diane Vickett, and my producer is Greg Rotuno. Together we speak with local sustainability leaders and invite you to connect, learn, and live with our community and planet in mind. Hello, friends. Before I introduce today's guest, I have a small favor to ask. If you enjoy EcoSpeak CLE, please help us spread the word by inviting a friend to listen. The more we share the stories and the inspiring people featured on the show, the stronger our community becomes. So take a moment right now and share a link to our show with a fellow eco enthusiast. And if you'd like to go a step further, become a supporting fan with a three, five, or seven dollar monthly donation. To do that, simply visit our website, ecospeakce.buzzsprout.com and click on the support the show link. Greg and I truly appreciate your support. All right. And on to today's episode. Joining us, we have Elizabeth Schuster, an environmental economist who started her business in 2019 called Sustainable Economies. Elizabeth helps organizations solve wicked problems by engaging them in systems-level strategic planning. And today we will hear how that process is unique and how you might apply that thinking to your organization. Elizabeth is also going to share some examples of her work featuring the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, the Franklin Park Conservatory in Columbus, and Summer County Metro Parks. So welcome, Elizabeth. Thank you for having me. Thank you for joining, joining me on this very snowy day. You came up from Worcester, I came from Sugaran Falls, and we met in the middle here in Brexville. So it's been a long winter so far. You and I met way back when, I think a few years ago, at an EcoMeet CLE event, which are our in-person networking events. So first of all, I would like to thank you for sponsoring those all these years. And there's some beautiful connections being made at those get togethers. Would you agree?

Elizabeth Schuster 2:18

Oh, I could not agree more. The first time I went to one of those, I felt like I had found my people. I have met so many great people through that network. Yeah.

Elizabeth's Story

Diane Bickett, Host 2:28

Good, good. Well, we'll keep doing them then. I couldn't agree more. So let's talk a little bit about what an environmental economist is. I understand you came here. You're a native New Englander. And one way or another you came to Cleveland. Tell us about that journey from New England to Cleveland and your journey to becoming an environmental economist and what that means.

Elizabeth Schuster 2:56

Aaron Ross Powell Well, it goes all the way back to Venezuela in 1998. That's a good start to your story. Thank you. I had not decided my major yet. I was in college at Oberlin College and doing my study abroad in Venezuela. And it was the second semester of sophomore year, and I couldn't decide on a major. So I signed up for an ecology study abroad. So we got to go to all the different ecosystems as part of our coursework. We got to go to the coast and the mountains and the rainforest. And when we got to the Andes Mountains, and I saw that there were farmers still growing their own food and plowing with oxen, I was mesmerized. I felt like this is the way we were meant to live, and I couldn't believe they were growing their own food. But the very next day I visited a farmer and I saw that they had refilled their DDT bottles with drinking water. Oh my gosh. Yeah. And, you know, here I was on this ecology study abroad where we were talking about the runoff of those chemicals into the rivers and the impact that has both on the ecosystem and your drink drinking water as well. And so I kind of knew in that moment, way back in 1998, that I cared about studying ecology, but I wanted to do it through the sustainability lens. I wanted those three pillars to be there. I could see that the human health, the local economic production, and the ecosystem health were all connected. So, I mean, fast forward, I don't want this to be too long of a story, but 10 years later, I ended up going back to get a graduate degree in agricultural and environmental studies. And I started off my career after grad school as an economist with the Nature Conservancy. So I think the stereotype or the cliche when people who have heard of an environmental economist think of it is that we put a dollar value on nature. So maybe we're showing that your local parks have an economic impact. That could be from tourism, or it could be that houses next to parks tend to have a higher value, a higher property value. Or on the ag side, one of my early projects was showing that if you plant native pollinator strips and you know attract more bumblebees and native pollinators next to your blueberries, there is a quantifiable increase in your yield of blueberries. So you could say that the value of the pollinator strip is the increased economic yield of the blueberries. But to me, even though that's the thing people think about the most, that's just one piece of environmental economics. For me, it's actually about making decisions around scarce resources because at the end of the day, we only have a finite number of forests, water, and land. And every day we have to make choices about trade-offs. So that's what we really do is we're helping people make choices around trade-offs.

Diane Bickett, Host 6:00

Work has taken you to the Nature Conservancy, the Peace Corps, you've worked in manufacturing, University of Arizona, but your company, Sustainable Economies, kind of does that draw in all the work that you've done, the expertise you've gained over the years, then it does.

Clients at the Intersection of Nature and Community

Elizabeth Schuster 6:22

I tend to think there are a lot of links, even to the manufacturing, you know, because then we can make the case that conservation project or our nature-based project maybe does have this economic contribution to it. So right now, yeah. Previously, right before this, I was in New Jersey and we did come to Ohio because of my husband's job at Ohio State University. Right now, about two-thirds of our clients are Ohio-based, and about one-third are outside of Ohio. Most of our clients are at the intersection, working at the intersection of nature and communities. And our clients range from we've worked with the Cleveland Tree Coalition. You know, that's a very urbanized project, working with the urban canopy. I've also worked with farmers in Vermont. And that's another way to come at sustainability because the program that we analyzed in Vermont was looking at regenerative agriculture, access to healthy foods, and entrepreneurialism for farm businesses. So just to give you an example of the range that sustainability projects can cover.

Diane Bickett, Host 7:30

Fun job.

Elizabeth Schuster 7:32

Yes, we never get bored.

Diane Bickett, Host 7:33

It sounds really interesting. How does strategic planning for a conservation organization differ from just like a regular non-environmental type organization? How is your work unique in this space?

Elizabeth Schuster 7:51

Compared to other types of strategic planning, I hear a lot of groups in other sectors have short-term goals. So they say, oh, everything's changing. We can only have one or two-year goals. That doesn't really work in conservation because if you're working on issues like water quality or if you're trying to reduce the rate of extinction of species, if you change your goal every two years, you're never going to achieve your goals. So that's actually one of the reasons I went into this space, that a lot of the global conservation groups who had these water quality and biodiversity goals were not achieving these goals at a fast enough rate. And so I was brought on as an environmental economist to help conservation groups explore new types of collaborations so that they could achieve their goals. So I think the longer time frame, the need for these complex partnerships, it is becoming more politicized. So that's something we have to think about. And then you had talked about wicked problems in your introduction. Wicked problems was a term that was coined first in 1973. I did want to read the definition. A wicked problem is a complex, persistent, and evolving issue that is difficult or impossible to solve due to incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements. So climate change very closely fits that definition. And so does food security. So a lot of the issues we're working on are so complex they need those partnerships in the multiple years to address them. Yeah, makes sense.

Diane Bickett, Host 9:29

Is there like a right way and a wrong way to systems level thinking? You said that earlier that sometimes you work with an organization where there might be some frustration and never getting to a goal. How do you work with your clients and their employees and their stakeholders to keep keep them focused?

Strategic Planning Process

Elizabeth Schuster 9:55

Well, I think if there were a right way to do this, we'd have already solved the problem. So I don't I think the reason it's hard is because long question, short answer. Um usually though, what we do is we start very broad. In order to really understand the system's connections, even if it's a conservation project or an urban forestry project, we might be talking to transportation and infrastructure and economic development and education and arts and culture and agricultural partners. So I think it's important to start broad so you understand those different connections. And we also say we're looking for unintended consequences. But if it's an unintended consequence, how could you know it's going to happen? Well, the way you do it is you're really thorough and you leave no rocks unturned. So you ask a lot of questions early on with the hopes of surfacing some concerns. And we do see some concerns with conservation projects. Sometimes there's a new park that goes in. And if there's not the right communication about it, people will initially oppose it before they understand. So you're trying to get ahead of those things that people might oppose or not want to support. So one of the things we ask a lot in strategic planning is we ask, we engage multiple partners across those different areas that I said. And we will even ask, what do you think the blind spots are? What is something we might be missing? And so that's how you start to uncover both the unexpected and those systems-level connections.

Example 1: Franklin Park Conservatory and Botanical Garden

Diane Bickett, Host 11:29

Okay. Should we talk about an example?

Elizabeth Schuster 11:33

Sure. One of the one of my favorite examples is Franklin Park Conservatory and Botanical Gardens down in Columbus. And they are a botanical garden. Interestingly, I did not actually do their strategic plan. They brought me in at the end of strategic planning. Everyone, most of their partners and constituents had said, you need to have a sustainability plan. That's what came up during strategic planning. So they hired our team to do the sustainability plan. And I happen to have been talking to my contact there, Jenny Pope, and just last week. And she said to me, Elizabeth, we wouldn't have been able to do it without you because we didn't know where to start. Yeah, it's a very vague term and broad. Right. So sustainability plan. How would you go about the process of figuring out what are the areas that matter? And what I told them a lot is sustainability plans aren't about the practices. It's not just about recycling or reducing energy, it's about why you're doing it. Because if you know why you're doing it, that's going to make it more relevant. So we had what was cool about their process is they were really open to it being community-led and staff-led. So that was exciting.

Diane Bickett, Host 12:50

Did your stakeholders have the same definition of sustainability when they went into the process, or did it vary? That is so great that you asked that question.

Elizabeth Schuster 13:04

Every single person I talked to had a different definition of sustainability. And a lot of them are what I would consider too narrow. It was either only about sustainability of the building. Okay. Or only about environmental sustainability. And we felt that they couldn't have the same impact if they were only looking at environmental sustainability or only looking at the footprint of their building. That if they could reach outside of the gate of the botanical garden, reach into the surrounding communities and work with some of the partners in the region working on these same goals, then they could contribute to these bigger picture goals and it would add up to more and it would have more community relevance. So it was really important to us to engage the community. In fact, we even did a community workshop with the neighborhoods surrounding it. And one of the interesting things that came out of it is that access to food ended up being one of their pillars. Really? Love it. How was that connection made? Now, they were already doing a garden program. It wasn't new, but they weren't calling it a sustainability program. It was just one of the many programs they were doing, is that they were leveraging their skills as horticulturalists and teaching the communities in the surrounding neighborhoods how to plant vegetable gardens so that they could access healthier foods. And it was through the planning process that we realized that access to food was one of the five most important areas of focus. It was the thing that resonated most with the community. So we were able to expand that. It tells a better story because they also have a cafe. So adding in healthier foods and locally sourced foods into their cafe and helping with the local gardens added to this bigger narrative. And the numbers I have are they, I think this was, this number was from 2024. Those are my most recent numbers, but they awarded 25 garden grants, uh totaling $40,000 that directly benefited local community gardens. Their big thing is they want sustainability in the way the gardens are designed so that they won't be one-year things, but they'll live for multiple years. They organized volunteer sessions at 24 community gardens and engaged 214 volunteers. So if that was before the sustainability plan was launched, then this gave them the opportunity to really scale that up and bring in even more partners.

Diane Bickett, Host 15:41

That's really cool. When you and I first started talking about this episode, you talk about how, you know, you're working at a systems level, you know, we're working on environmental issues, and there are so many factors that could go into that process. You might be thinking about environmental justice and equity. You might be thinking about how to define partnerships, how you might want to incorporate data and science and organizational capacity and not and not only, you know, just long-term financial stewardship. How do you take all those factors into consideration when you work with a client?

Elizabeth Schuster 16:23

Well, first off, any client who work who reaches out to us is usually growing. Usually the reason they're reaching out is they've grown. They now have so many programs they don't know how to prioritize. And maybe they are then having trouble communicating all the great work they do and what their impact is. So normally in that space, because there are a lot of different directions you could take a strategic planning process, we ask the client, what is the most important challenge you want to solve today, or what is the most important question you want to be able to answer because of strategic planning. So we let the client's greatest need guide the process. And I think that a lot of people mistakenly, like particularly people coming out of like an MBA program or the business world, you often hear this very specific definition of what strategy is. And, you know, maybe it's around the business case for the strategy. In the nonprofit world, in some ways, this might sound funny for me to say this as a strategic planner, but the strategy is the least important part of the whole process. It's about the process of communicating across departments and about understanding what matters most for your organization and understanding how you benefit communities and ecosystems. So the first phase is always about understanding that why and what matters. And then we go into setting goals and it's a collaborative process. So everybody on the team has buy-in and they understand why these goals were set. We do have the strategy phase, and then we build in accountability because if you don't know who's doing it, it's not going to get done. And so I think some people see the end product, which is the strategic plan and has the goals and the strategies. And it's great to have that document and have that clarity. But what happened behind the scenes with the communication and the collaboration and the building of the trust and the accountability, it's that process that's much more important than just the piece of paper that comes out of it.

Diane Bickett, Host 18:32

And I think I imagine getting the team thinking along the same lines is really important. I mean, everyone is working and doing their job, but if you got them all in a room and said, what do we do? or what's our mission, they would all have different ideas based upon what their individual part of that organization is. So getting clear on the core mission and their elevator speech is often really hard.

Elizabeth Schuster 19:05

And that's literally yes, that's literally the most important piece is that everybody's rowing in the same direction. And what we have found is when you have a fair and transparent process, that even if some people don't, you know, get the dream project that they wanted or they don't have the goal that they really had been trying to push, if it's a fair and transparent process, they're usually okay because they understand why the decision was made. And that so that's why having that collaborative approach means that people are more got in bought into what the final goals are. How far out do you usually plan? Most of our conservation plans, they have three to five year goals. So you have something a little more near-term. But we usually encourage people to have either a 10 or a 25-year goal because of what I was saying before, that you need to be investing resources for a certain number of years to be able to make progress towards biodiversity, reducing the loss of or the rate of loss of extinction of species or water quality goals.

Diane Bickett, Host 20:15

How do you keep goal setting realistic? It used to be people would use the term BHAG, big, hairy, audacious goal. And how do you keep that process reined in in such a way that it's realistic?

Elizabeth Schuster 20:34

I think the longer-term goals can be a little more aspirational. Okay. As long as they're specific enough that you know why you're doing them. So if they're specific enough that you're working on forests or wetland or in a certain geography, or that you're looking for a certain community health outcome, that's starting to get you towards what matters most. And those that sort of level of outcome becomes your North Star. So it's okay if the long-term goal is a little more audacious, but your three to five-year-old five-year goal should be the realistic one. And so that's how you bridge the two pieces. The long-term is aspirational, it gives you the vision, it gives you something to dream towards, but the short-term goal is attainable.

Example 2: Cleveland Museum of Natural History, Natural Areas Program

Diane Bickett, Host 21:17

Okay. With steps to get there. Yeah. Okay. Let's talk about the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. You worked with them on their natural areas program. Tell us about what you were hired to do there and a little bit about the program itself, because I'm not all that clear on that part of their work.

Elizabeth Schuster 21:40

We are still in the middle of this process. It's a really fun project. A lot of people don't know that the Cleveland Museum of Natural History has a land trust within it. Their natural areas program has protected 12,500 acres since 1955.

Diane Bickett, Host 21:58

I never knew that. I did not.

Elizabeth Schuster 22:00

Know that yeah, very exciting.

Diane Bickett, Host 22:02

And where where is where is that?

Elizabeth Schuster 22:04

They are across northern Ohio. Okay. One of their earlier preserves is on Kelly's Island. Mentor Marsh is their flagship preserve where they've done the most investment. I think that's Lake County.

Diane Bickett, Host 22:16

Mm-hmm. And we've heard of these things and we did know the museum was behind it.

Elizabeth Schuster 22:21

Yes.

Diane Bickett, Host 22:21

So what are they doing in these natural areas?

Elizabeth Schuster 22:24

Aaron Powell Well, in the same way that the museum has a natural history collection, these preserves are also a living collection of particularly rare and unique habitat types. I see. Very cool.

Diane Bickett, Host 22:39

So what was the what was the focus of your work with them?

Elizabeth Schuster 22:43

We are doing a strategic plan for the natural areas program. And we started off by doing an assessment. And so we have finished this assessment. And so we did a positioning analysis, which is so Cleveland Museum of Natural History, to the best of our knowledge, is the only natural history museum in the country with a land protection program at this scale. Wow. So when we say them. Very exciting. So we were curious, although there aren't other natural history museums who have done this, we were curious: are there other institutions who have had land preservation programs and how did they leverage them? So we did an assessment of that. We did benchmarking interviews of other peer organizations, peer land trusts in Ohio. We did stakeholder engagements. So we interviewed or did focus groups with 80 different people, both internal and external, to the museum.

Diane Bickett, Host 23:44

What was the purpose of the stakeholder engagements? What were some of the things that you asked?

Elizabeth Schuster 23:50

Since we're early on in the process, we asked big picture, what has already been the most successful thing that the museum has done? What are they known for? And what should be what should they be doing more of in the future?

Diane Bickett, Host 24:03

Did they also dinosaurs?

Elizabeth Schuster 24:07

Well, we had a very targeted audience. While the general public does not know about this amazingly successful program, there are a lot of conservation partners who do. So they had pretty intimate knowledge of the sort of projects they had done within the natural areas program.

Diane Bickett, Host 24:22

So is part of your engagement or helping them figure out how to make the public more aware of this aspect of their work?

Elizabeth Schuster 24:31

Yeah, there already are conversations on how they can protect the pristineness of some of these habitats while raising more awareness and strategically having access to places that can be accessed. But yeah, we're still in the process of prioritizing. And so, you know, my business partner Marissa and I, we use social science. And so we do a qualitative analysis. And so what we're doing is across these 80 interviews or meetings with people within focus groups, we collect comments and we add every single comment that was received into a spreadsheet. And then we apply a code for what the theme was in that comment. And so that's how that's one of the biggest ways that we get to what matters most is we hear what the themes are that are coming up over and over and over again across both your internal and your external stakeholders.

Diane Bickett, Host 25:29

Wow, that's interesting. It's like a word cloud. So repetitive words, maybe we should be paying attention. Exactly. In January, you brought in a new partner to your firm. So now you are a partner of a firm of two, two women. Tell us about Marissa and what she's going to be doing for sustainable economies.

Elizabeth Schuster 25:53

Yeah, so Marissa is a communications branding and marketing expert. And it worked out really well because she used to be based in Colorado. And after she moved to the Shaker Heights area, she was shifting her business into conservation and sustainability. And I was getting requests by every client I worked with that they wanted more communications in our projects. You can imagine in conservation that we use a lot of lofty scientific language around species and habitat and water quality. So if you aren't thinking about communications when you create your plan, you're going to end up with a plan that has so much technical language that maybe your staff understands it, but nobody else understands what's in the plan. So it's really important that you're breaking down your goals so that you could tell your same goal to your team and to visitors to the museum, like in the Cleveland Museum of Natural History case. You want it to be easily understood across all audiences. And we were getting that request a lot. So it was just natural to start partnering on all of our projects together.

Example 3: Summit Metroparks

Diane Bickett, Host 27:03

Sounds like a good move for your company. And Marissa Ferrari is her full name. You also did extensive public engagement with the Summit Metro Parks, their Wild Backyards program. Tell us about that.

Elizabeth Schuster 27:17

Oh, yeah. Well, we did their strategic plan. The Wild Backyards is just one of the amazing examples of their programs. And I think they're a very complex organization. They're a park district, but they have both a conservation lens, so they preserve land, and then they have the recreation lens as well. And so I think that can make it very challenging for a very large staff to all unify around shared goals. And this is not unique to them. Any organization of a certain size is going to have trouble breaking down silos and communicating and rallying around shared goals. And so when they brought us in to do the strategic planning, we knew that that was one of the interests. And one of the early activities that we did with them is we asked them, what has been the best example of success that your team has ever done? And let's see if we can reverse engineer that. And so interesting. Yeah, it was a kind of a cool entry point. And so Wild Backyards is the program that came up the most often as being their most successful program. In fact, they even use the tagline Wear Your Backyard. It encourages people in their own backyard to use native plants in their landscaping instead of imported plants from other areas. And it's very accessible because you can do it at any size or scale. And what we found is when we talked to their staff about this wildly successful program, it turned out that these breaking down silos and these communication issues were not a problem during wild backyards. They were having excellent communication and they were breaking down silos and they were working together. So we could see that on their best day in this best most successful program, they were already doing really well. And one of the things that we heard from the staff is it's they were living their values also.

Diane Bickett, Host 29:20

Oh, I love that. It's something they were all clear on and how it was important to each of them.

Elizabeth Schuster 29:26

A hundred percent, yes. And so we were able to take that same energy and how can we bring that same clarity to the six goals that ended up coming out in their strategic plan? I see. Wow.

Diane Bickett, Host 29:41

As you reflect a little bit on your work in this field, what would you say is the most rewarding aspect of your work?

Elizabeth Schuster 29:54

I have found that the facilitation of these community workshops has been the most fulfilling thing. And every once in a while, somebody at one of these sessions will start crying. Wow. There are other times I I have been yelled at before. That's more uncommon. I think both extremes, though, speak to the fact that a lot of emotions are coming out of these sessions. And I don't get triggered, like I don't get offended when that happens because I know that they're having a moment. And it's actually very validating to know that we can hear them. It signals to me that probably in the past their voice wasn't heard. And that's why, whether it's tears or anger, there is some satisfaction in knowing that now their voice could be heard in a different way. So I like to think that we can come and maybe fix some wrong that happened in the past by hearing their voice and committing more deeply to actually incorporating that feedback.

Tips from Elizabeth

Diane Bickett, Host 31:02

I think too, they, you know, oftentimes you don't have the chance to really think about the work you do every day and express what it means to you. So if it's important enough to bring someone to tears, that says something about working in this industry and having a passion for what you do. Oh my gosh, that is so true. Yeah. So how might people listening today incorporate some of this thinking into their work? Do you have any tips for us?

Elizabeth Schuster 31:34

I think any organization during strategic planning can think about the positive impact that they could have on ecosystems, the local economy, and communities. And teeny example, I've worked with an art center before, and we use that lens with them. And you'd think, oh, an art center, they're doing artwork, they're doing dance classes. How could that possibly connect to nature? But a lot of examples came up of people being inspired by images from nature or even having public art in parks. So that's a teeny example to show that even if you think that that those three pillars aren't relevant to your organization, there might be more opportunities than you think.

Diane Bickett, Host 32:19

That's good. That's a good lens from which to look. How would people get in touch with you?

Elizabeth Schuster 32:25

The easiest way to find us is through our website. We check the contact form regularly. So it's sustainableeconomies.com. We have lots of example projects on the website. So that's also a good way to get to know our work. And we are on LinkedIn as well, but unfortunately, no other social media platforms.

Diane Bickett, Host 32:44

Elizabeth Schuster, thank you so much for joining us. Um, I really enjoyed our conversation.

Elizabeth Schuster 32:50

Uh, I'm very honored that you included us. Thank you very much.

Greg Rotuno 32:54

We hope you've enjoyed this episode of EcoSpeak CLE. You can find our full catalog of episodes on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. New episodes are available the first and third Tuesday of each month. Please follow EcoSpeak CLE on Facebook and Instagram and become part of the conversation. If you would like to send us feedback and suggestions, or if you'd like to become a sponsor of EcoSpeak CLE, you can email us at hello at ecospexcle.com. Stay tuned for more important and inspiring stories to come.