Claire Bosch Zuazo Smiling on a back grenn background with a light green and black thread

Environmental Studies Alumni Career Spotlight: Claire Bosch Zuazo 

(This is part of a series spotlighting and exploring the career paths of graduates of Antioch University’s School of Environmental Studies.)

Name: Claire Bosch Zuazo
Pronoun: she/her
Program: MS in Resource Management and Administration; Certificate in Climate Resilience
Title: Associate Director, Global Strategy Practice at the Anthesis Group 
Graduation year: 2021

What are you passionate about? 

I am passionate about bringing different stakeholder voices to the table to better understand the nuances of sustainability challenges. More and more we are seeing that solutions related to environmental quality and social impact require holistic approaches that cannot only be addressed by government actors, cannot be entrusted to private companies alone, and require supporting a diverse set of voices from community leaders to workers, youth and women. I’m passionate about finding pragmatic ways to do this and influencing through action.

What skills did you learn at Antioch that helped you achieve your professional goals?

Antioch helped me hone in my understanding of systems thinking and how to apply that in a resource management setting. The program’s ability to explain and give us hands-on experience of the nexus of organizational leadership and operations had a significant impact on me and helped shape my career trajectory. Antioch empowered and equipped me with the right balance of theory, practical organizational examples and case studies, and applied thinking to identify ways in which it is possible to align sustainability issues within an organization’s priorities and gain stakeholder buy-in.

What would you like to share with potential students?

I obtained this graduate degree more than 10 years after completing my undergraduate degree in urban and environmental planning. In many ways, having been in the workforce and taking time to identify if and what I’d like to study further, allowed me to select a graduate program that would give me the practice and expertise I felt that I needed to complement my career skills and experience to date, and that had sufficient flexibility in the coursework for me to select the courses and professors I was interested in. I appreciated Antioch’s faculty and focus on pragmatic learning; every paper, presentation, or group project I worked on was a learning experience in and of itself and I now apply the skills I used to deliver my coursework in my day-to-day work setting. 

What would you like to share, based on your work, that you feel excited/proud/energized about? 

I spent more than 15 years in the international development sector, designing and managing projects operating at the intersection of local livelihoods and biodiversity conservation in Latin America, West and Central Africa, and Southeast Asia with funds from international donor agencies. I recently made a shift to working for a highly specialized consulting firm that works with companies to assess their environmental footprint and sustainability performance and advise them to improve their environmental and social impact in a way that also helps them drive performance. I am energized by the role that the private sector can play in shifting consumer and policy behavior, and feel proud of the role I play in supporting business leaders in this transformation during this decisive decade for action and being able to tie in my experience working in many of the countries where these companies have a presence, either through their operations, their supply chain, or their customer base.

Listen to the Anthesis podcast Activating Sustainability Podcast Series here.