Sustainability was always the plan, purpose made it possible

The second time Shay Howell ’26 applied for the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) Climate Corps fellowship, she stared down the same questions as before— “who am I and what am I working towards?” — but this time she had an answer.

The answer didn’t come from a single class or conversation. It came from years of doing the work, then learning to see it and herself differently. This summer, Howell, who recently completed the Dual Master of Business Administration in Sustainable Solutions and Master of Public Administration in Social Justice and Sustainability through the Presidio Center for Sustainable Solutions, will begin her EDF fellowship.

“This summer I'll be working with Asana Partners, a vertically integrated real estate company with $7 billion in assets across the United States,” she said. A big part of her work will focus on transforming data into a cohesive narrative about what sustainability means for their business, tenants, and their ongoing mission. “I'm excited to bring that analytical rigor and storytelling together in one role.”

The journey towards sustainability

Long before Presidio, Howell’s sustainability work began at San Francisco’s Hotel Drisco, where she served as the property’s first sustainability lead. In addition to earning the boutique hotel a Green Business Certification, Howell worked to install an aqueous ozone cleaning system, eliminating the property’s reliance on bleach.

“When we reopened after the 2020 pandemic, we had completely new cleaning processes that were a lot more sanitation-intensive, and we had this technology already in place,” she said. From that experience, the desire to deepen her knowledge of sustainability took hold.

“I had encountered so many people from Presidio doing this kind of work and began to refine my idea of what sustainability meant in the hotel and in the wider world,” she said. “I thought it would be a good idea to go to graduate school.”

Lessons for a greener world

Arriving at Presidio with more professional experience than some of her peers, Howell sought a chance to get out of the hospitality industry and into serious sustainability work. Through case competitions, experiential learning, and a philosophical shift towards actionable work, she began to fill knowledge gaps and answer hard questions about who is served by impact work. This question took center stage in her blog, “Rooted in Place: How Net Impact Inspired My Commitment to Indigenous-Led Sustainability,” reflecting on Presidio’s commitment to paying the Shuumi Land Tax.

“At Presidio, we consider the most vulnerable people — the frontline workers, the marginalized stakeholders, the people who may have been loudly speaking about things for a long time, but were never brought into consideration,” she said.

“In climate work, we have to partner with the people and land to accomplish our sustainability goals. This must be larger than ourselves or our organization to have a tangible climate impact. We cannot do this work alone or in isolation. We have to partner with these communities to start a movement that truly becomes inevitable.”

Though Howell’s setting has changed, her mission hasn’t. Sustainability has always come down to one thing: “doing the thing and then telling the story.”

Discover the Presidio Center for Sustainable Solutions at Redlands.