Sarah Finnie is the Founding Director of The 51 Percent Project, a climate-communication initiative launched at the Institute for Global Sustainability (IGS) at Boston University. Her research identifies best practices for climate-change communication to engage multiple stakeholders on the global clean-energy transition, especially those leading in media, industry, government, finance, and communities. The Project won an Association for Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) 2022 award. Finnie is advisor to the Graduate Program in Urban Biogeoscience & Environmental Health and a Senior Fellow at the Impact Measurement & Allocation Program (IMAP). As an IGS Senior Fellow, she co-directed "Data and Misinformation in an Era of Sustainability and Climate Change Crises," a joint Focused Research Program (FRP) with IGS and the Hariri Institute for Computing.

She is also the Founding Partner of WeSpire, a B Corp providing companies with a technology platform to design, run, and measure the impact of their employee-engagement initiatives including sustainability, social-impact, wellbeing, and positive workplace culture programs. Fortune "great green idea,” short-list for Global CleanTech 100, Wired top start-up of Boston. Bank of America, Cox, Disney, MGM Resorts, Unilever.

Finnie speaks and teaches on behavioral climate science, especially in large organizations; as well as on women’s issues of ambition, career, motherhood, and resilience. Current and recent research centers on Climate Mis- and Disinformation; accelerating the rapid switch to decarbonization via major financial players and corporations; mainstream media coverage of the climate story; and efficacy of student-produced content to affect peer perceptions of climate comprehension and agency.

Finnie is a Climate Reality Leader and Mentor; ecoAmerica trustee; and vice chair of the Princeton78 Foundation, whose endowment fuels undergraduate service projects in the US and globally. She is a judge for the Bow Seat Ocean Awareness, a contest for students that attracts 4,000+ applications from around the world every year. She serves on the Advisory Board of the Planetary Health Alliance at Johns Hopkins; and on the academic advisory council for Second Nature, who invited her to present at the 2023 Higher Education Leadership Summit. She is a trustee of New York-Connecticut Audubon Society and on the Advisory Council and Climate Roundtable at Boston Harbor Now.

Finnie holds a Princeton B.A., Middlebury M.A. (Bread Loaf School of English). She graduated with the inaugural cohort of Seth Godin’s altMBA. She began her career at The New Yorker, continued at The Atlantic and at iVillage, where she was launch content director to IPO.  She lives near New York City and has four young grandchildren.

Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Well+Good, Family Life, HuffPo and on the IGS, Moms Clean Air Force (EDF), MindBodyGreen, Kripalu, and Safe Schools blogs.  A member of the São Paulo Declaration for Planetary Health organizing team, she contributed to the 2021 benchmark paper in The Lancet.

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English majors appreciate a good storyline, and global warming has all the elements of the most ambitious, dramatic page-turner: villains, heroes and heroines, mass migrations and unborn generations; howling winds, floods, fires; social unrest, fortunes to be made and lost; injustice, conflict, greed, epiphany, victory, and the fate of humanity among them. 

Finnie doesn’t like to worry, but on the other hand, she believes that we must not waste another minute solving the problem of climate inaction. She also believes that when we do, a host of other seemingly intractable challenges will take care of themselves. 

Contact:

sfinnier@bu.edu @SarahFinnie51 LinkedIn