The 51 Percent Project is based at the Institute for Global Sustainability at Boston University, where Sarah Finnie is a Senior Fellow. The work is informed by the capacious framework of the Planetary Health Alliance at Johns Hopkins University, where she serves on the advisory board; and by the ongoing research and people-centric activism of ecoAmerica, a Washington, DC organization where she is a Trustee. Focused on the massive financial transition underway, she has investigated corporate climate action in collaboration with Elke Weber’s team at Princeton University’s Behavioral Science for Policy Lab. They focus on the world’s largest financial institutions; and on corporate coalitions that promote bold decarbonization. Finnie serves on the advisory council for Boston Harbor Now and its Climate Roundtable.
At BU, The 51 Percent Project works with student teams, faculty, and sustainability champions across the University. We are a founding supporter of the Covering Climate Now initiative, which provides a hub for reporters to accelerate accurate mainstream media coverage. For more, please follow Sarah Finnie via LinkedIn and Twitter @SarahFinnie51.
Watch the CCN’s 2021awards for exceptional media coverage of the climate crisis during the pandemic year, when public awareness peaked.
Influential IGS output includes the Carbon Free Boston summary report, which maps the city’s plan to reach carbon neutrality by 2050: “Released in January 2019, this is the first of three companion reports that extensively uses real-world data to evaluate Boston’s options to reach carbon neutrality by 2050. The report’s comprehensive analysis, led by the Institute for Sustainable Energy in collaboration with the Boston Green Ribbon Commission, evaluates key strategies across the transportation, building, waste, and energy sectors to inform the City’s Climate Action Plan update.”
Hothouse Productions, BU College of Communication. Communication students team-produced three 30-second videos that were selected by a division of Hearst media for wide distribution on Saturday-morning family programming, amplified via social media, and seen by millions of viewers. Watch these PSAs via ISE’s YouTube channel, and click here for a documentary that tells the partnership story.
In collaboration with Prof. Garland Waller, Director of the TV Graduate Program at BU; and Meg LaVigne, President of Television, Litton Entertainment, a division of Hearst Television.
“PRLab is the longest-running student-led PR agency in the country. In its 41st year of innovation, PRLab is working to galvanize necessary conversations about climate change and to accelerate solutions by activating the empowered voices of Gen Z and their networks.” Faculty: Amy Shanler and Justin Joseph, Co-Directors, PRLab at BU and Associate Professors of the Practice, Public Relations.
“PRLAB’S Sustain4Sapiens: Enacting Change Through Instagram,” BU Communicator, April 29, 2019
MFA Design for Social Innovation, School of Visual Arts, New York. Design for Social Innovation is a one-of-a-kind Graduate program at the School of Visual Arts in NYC, mobilizing designers as creators of new social conditions that increase equity, social justice and resilience for the benefit of global communities. Led by Founding Chair Cheryl Heller.
“This is a moment in time,” she writes. “If creatures from another planet ever talk one day about the fate of humans on Earth, the conversation won’t be about how ergonomically our chairs were designed, how fashionable our clothes were, how erudite our theories, how much money we made, or how many industries were disrupted by design. They will say either that we pulled ourselves out of a near-fatal collision at the last possible second, or that we missed the greatest opportunity ever handed to any species in the infinite cosmos and blew up the sweetest planet that ever was.”