Foundation News

Sierra Club Foundation, the season one sponsor of Atmos Magazine's new podcast “The Nature Of,” is proud to announce the release of its latest episode, “The Nature of Capital.” This installment of the series highlights the work of Sierra Club Foundation board member and Resident Fellow at Yale Center for Business and the Environment, Steph Speirs. 

“The Nature Of” is a podcast that looks to the natural world, as well as luminaries across climate and culture, for teachings on some of the most critical issues of our time. Episode six, “The Nature of Capital," features an interview of Steph by Atmos Magazine’s Editor-in-Chief, Willow Defebaugh. Listeners hear directly from one of the Sierra Club Foundation’s leaders about efforts to align financial resources with strategic outcomes, provide flexible funding for innovation, build capacity in the environmental movement, and create partnerships with a broad spectrum of allied organizations around shared values and goals. Steph also provides insight into the Sierra Club Foundation’s Shifting Trillions initiative, which refers to the role of capital in moving as quickly as possible toward a better world for all living things. Audiences leave the episode with firsthand knowledge of how the Sierra Club Foundation is working to build something better: a world that supports the right of everyone to live in healthy communities with just and restorative economic systems on a thriving planet. 

“The only predictive thing that shows whether people take climate action is if they see everyone around them doing it too. That action is contagious and invigorating and inspiring, and if people see people they trust do something, they want to do it too,” said Steph Speirs, who co-founded a community-based solar company that worked to put affordable solar in the hands of everyday Americans. “So we often talk about financial capital as the most important currency in the world, money as being the most important currency in the world, or if you work in clean energy, you often talk about electricity being the most important currency, but in fact, trust is the most important currency. Especially in these times. And trust is earned, not entitled. So trust is the currency in which we should build our systems.”

Stream the episode wherever you get your podcasts to learn more about how Shifting Trillions at the Sierra Club Foundation is at the forefront of the transition to a resource-efficient, clean energy economy that better serves people and nature.