By Grant Alexander
Grant Alexander is a senior honors student and Pogue Scholar at UNC Chapel Hill majoring in International Politics and Social Movements in Latin America and Africa in the Global Department who plans to pursue a Masters Degree in Public Policy. During the summer of 2024, Grant worked as a Sustainable Finance intern with the Ackerman Center for Excellence in Sustainability.
The Ackerman Center for Excellence in Sustainability
The Ackerman Center for Excellence in Sustainability (ACES) is an institution which partners with the UNC Kenan Flagler Business School and the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise to provide a space at Carolina which centers social and environmental sustainability in business activity. The center aims to inspire responsible thought leadership and action within the private sector to align profitable business solution innovation with corporate responsibility and holistic impact. In order to achieve these goals, ACES focuses on building insightful curriculums for MBA, Executive MBA, and undergraduate students as well as manufacturing, organizing, and promoting applicable research on sustainable enterprise as achieved through strategy, marketing, finance, real estate, or entrepreneurship.
In addition to these initiatives, the center collaborates with and hosts career development organizations on campus to prepare students for real world professional opportunities that engage the triple bottom line framework (people, planet, profit). These include programs like LIFT, the Sustainability Awards, BLiS, the Sustainable Business Club, the Clean Tech Summit (for which ACES partners with the Institute for the Environment), the Careers with Impact Forum / Invest for Impact Competition / MBA Food Conference (for which ACES partners with the MBA Net Impact Club), and STAR as well as various other events and funding opportunities.
Each semester (fall, spring, and summer) ACES employs student interns to work with faculty and key partners in the sustainability space to understand and subsequently disseminate critical information on corporate sustainability to the public and stakeholders alike. Students come from various backgrounds and have interests in specializing in public policy, social work, city and regional planning, and environmental science among other topics.
Working with such a diverse team not only allowed me the opportunity to witness thorough and interdisciplinary analysis of business activity, but also allowed me to use my background in global humanities and politics to:
- investigate public funding options to design blended finance methods that electric mobility investors may benefit from;
- review EV related policies at the federal level; and
- appreciate the emphasis on environmental and social impact that the center foregrounds.
Advancing Electric Mobility Investment in North Carolina
ACES research explores a number of interesting facets of sustainability, from AI strategy programs to biomaterials and product life cycles, and industries which are relevant to the economic development of North Carolina, such as the textiles and electric mobility industry. This past summer, while working closely with Executive Director Jeffery Mittelstadt, Associate Director Tracy Triggs-Matthews, Program Manager Mary Kay Lemon, and Research Assistant Taylor Maffeo, I developed market reports for an MBA curriculum on the electric mobility landscape of North Carolina.
My work this summer culminated into a memo that served as an internal resource for Professor Mittelstadt to use in teaching his students about the funding and growth possibilities of the industry locally. Ultimately, my research partner and I highlighted public health and climate change expenditures related to air pollution, investor networks, macroeconomic impact figures, opportunities for public and private partnerships, the significance of electric mobility investments as ESG finance options, methods of funding, and various blockades to financing the electric mobility transition based on stakeholder inputs. Additionally, her work went in depth on EV supply chains and lifecycles.
This experience equipped me with invaluable tools for proving the simultaneous economic viability of sustainable strategies within businesses.
I am extremely grateful for opportunities to interview experts in the industry, advancing both my connections in the sustainability space and my knowledge on what high-level conversations about electric mobility in these spaces consist of. I am also grateful for a professional highlight of my summer, which consisted of visiting a forestry and cattle farm in Eastern North Carolina which used sustainable methods to lower costs, risks, and negative environmental and social impacts simultaneously.
The trip provided a practical model for the triple bottom line which we had reviewed in an intern learning session at the start of the summer, and all of my team members and I were enamored with the impacts of the principles we were engaging with. For me, seeing sustainability applied in a business that had a degree of separation from high-level corporate spaces and seeing theory put into practice with something as labor intensive and nature-based as farming showed me that sustainable practices are applicable and important not just in regards to the emissions of large corporations, but also in the practices of various enterprises and small businesses.
Reflections on my Summer Interning with ACES
Through my internship with ACES, I was able to build credibility in speaking about sustainability that went beyond its impact driven importance. Before beginning this internship, these solely dominated my motivations for environmental advocacy. This experience equipped me with invaluable tools for proving the simultaneous economic viability of sustainable strategies within businesses.
The structure of the internship, combining independent research, stakeholder interviews, and collaborative weekly team meetings, was extremely conducive for an introduction to the latest research on and methods for using electric mobility investment to both mitigate the pollutive impacts of the private sector and build climate resilience in the state of North Carolina. It is already helping me in a sustainability role that I have also had the chance to engage with this semester and helped me to reflect on environmental policy and conservation work from the past.
For more information about the Ackerman Center for Excellence in Sustainability visit: https://aces.kenaninstitute.unc.edu/