FOUNDERS UNFILTERED: Q&A WITH SARAH HUMPHRYS, CEO & CO-FOUNDER AT AIMHI EARTH

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USING EDUCATION TO IGNITE CLIMATE ACTION

This month Sarah Humphrys, CEO & co-founder at AimHi Earth is our Founder Unfiltered. AimHi Earth delivers live, online sustainability training. Every programme is built for the organisation it is delivered to, blending the latest climate science, behavioural psychology and storytelling.

The result is sessions that land differently: 97% of attendees change their behaviour as a result. AimHi Earth has trained more than 150,000 learners in six languages, for companies including PepsiCo, Sky, Capgemini and Unilever.

Q: What’s the scrappiest thing you’ve done so far to make progress?

In 2021 we partnered with the Eden Project in Cornwall to live stream a series of training sessions to over 1,000 learners worldwide, broadcasting from inside the rainforest biome. Unfortunately, we didn't fully anticipate that the heat and humidity of the rainforest would overheat our computer! Cue "technical difficulties" and an interruption to our session.

I do not usually present our training, we have a 'theatre troupe' of amazing and charismatic presenters from around the world to nail that part! But with hundreds of people watching, I improvised. I grabbed Dan Ryan from the Eden Project and we delivered an impromptu tour of the biome with live Q&A while the tech recovered and we resumed the session as planned.

It taught me early that contingency matters when everything you do happens live. We now have back-up plans, procedures and understudies for every session. The show must go on!

Q: In one sentence, what was your lightbulb moment for starting the business?

The facts and many of the solutions to the climate and nature crisis have been available for decades. Most people are still overwhelmed, distrustful or switched off.

For me the lightbulb moment was that the missing ingredient to climate action is rarely information, it's attention.

Q: What mistake are you glad you made?

I once pitched to an angel syndicate over Zoom and incorporated a joke slide into my presentation. The flow was: "What does our training actually look like?" Then a slide of skeletons on Zoom sitting through a text-heavy, disengaging PowerPoint. A beat. Then "Don't worry! Not like this."

What I hadn't accounted for was that every person in the virtual room would have their camera and microphone off. My risky joke was met with total silence. Tumbleweed. In the moment it was excruciating, and I was cross with myself for not investigating the set up or room dynamic ahead of time.

Months later I bumped into two of those investors at an event and both remembered the pitch, and that moment, warmly. The lesson I am glad I learned is that the thing which feels exposing is often the thing people remember. When you represent a training company that prides itself on actually sticking with its learners, that is perhaps more important than a safer pitch.

Q: What story about AimHi Earth has landed best with the media, and why?

An example I’m particularly proud of centred around the report we published on workplace climate engagement. It found that 93% of workers do not know how their company's sustainability strategy applies to their day-to-day job, and that 52% think their employer is likely to greenwash.

It landed because it put a number on something plenty of people already suspected. Most coverage looks at what leaders are promising. Very little looks at whether anyone below them actually understands what those promises mean for their own job. That gap is where good strategies stop turning into action, and naming it with data made it hard to argue with.

Q: What's one book you think everyone should read?

Rutger Bregman's Humankind. It argues that people are fundamentally decent, and that cooperation rather than competition is what got our species this far.

It really resonated with me because I see the opposite story is everywhere. The news, most of our politics and a fair amount of climate communication all run on the assumption that people are selfish and won't act unless they are frightened or forced. That assumption is exhausting, and it shapes what gets built. If you believe people don't care, you design training that lectures them instead of empowers them. I have watched thousands of people prove the opposite in our training sessions.

I would also add The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. An oldie but a goodie, and if your job is shifting how an entire organisation thinks, it’s full of fab examples about how ideas and trends actually spread. (Gladwell narrates the audiobook himself, which is worth it on its own.)

Q: Finish this sentence: Success looks like…

Success looks like sustainability and business resilience being recognised as the same discipline. Resilience is the ability to recover from a crisis, adapt quickly to new conditions, keep operating and go on to thrive.

When a drought cuts a harvest, the company that mapped its water risk keeps its product on the shelf and its competitor does not. When energy prices spike, the business that cut its demand years ago absorbs the hit.

Sustainability is the work of getting ahead of all that: it is the practice, resilience is the result. Success is the day when this is as obvious to a finance director as it is to a sustainability lead.

Q: One word you hope people use to describe you, and one word for AimHi Earth?

For me: curious. I have always been interested in the context people are in and the stories they tell about it, long before I trained as an anthropologist. It is why our training is built on stories rather than slides, and why every programme is shaped around the specific organisation it is for.

For AimHi Earth: showbiz. I realise this might sound like an odd word for a sustainability company, but I mean it seriously. Getting people's attention is one thing. Holding it for 90 minutes is another, and passive e-learning modules or powerpoint presentations rarely manage either. Our training combines the latest science and research with the energy and quality of an interactive TV show because we are competing with every other thing in someone's working day. The climate and nature crisis is the biggest challenge any of us will work on. We put that effort in so people leave motivated to act, and go and talk to someone else about it.