ProGRESS

Em Burnip is passionate about nature and the environment and when her daughter Grace was born she matched her business skills with her values to create Eco Wedding Festivals. But taking control of her own career path was less straightforward than simply setting up an eco-business while she was on maternity leave. She had developed a secure, good, if not always satisfying, career as a personal assi...

Holly Westgarth-Graham has returned to her studies after a spell working as an intern for sustainable travel company Byway, the flight-free holiday platform. She explains how her course is helping her carve out her own future, bringing ethical and eco-storytelling together with ethical innovation and strategic foresight, which she is specialising in, along with AI implementation, at Edinburgh Futu...

This episode drops in January, traditionally the month when people quit their jobs or evaluate whether what they are doing is the right thing for them. As an independent career coach alongside working as head of Change Agents UK's People and Placements team, Elspeth Yates helps people find their purpose in green careers. She encourages them to look at their existing skills and examine how they mig...

How do you land a job at a bank that creates positive social, environmental and cultural change? And how do you get to hear about banks like Triodos in the first place? Whitni Thomas, the daughter of missionaries (her father is a vicar), says that she never meant to go into banking. Yet she landed a plum (and highly sought-after) graduate role at JP Morgan, despite telling her careers advisor at u...

Carlos Terol is a founder at Good Ripple, a community of change-makers who want to make a difference in the world. He describes his fascinating journey to find meaning and purpose in his work life over the last 10 years, and how he is enabling others to make positive, ethical social impact through their own jobs. To wind the clock back to his early career, Carlos's love of maths, problem solving a...

Dr Jessica Tipton, or Jess as she is known, is head of the National Education Nature Park at the Natural History Museum, a project commissioned by the Department for Education as part of its Sustainability and Climate Strategy . In 2020 Jess founded the UK Schools Sustainability Network (UKSSN) as head of youth networks at Global Action Plan. She led a delegation of students to the COP26 global cl...

Here's the Series 5 grand finale, featuring the best bits of the latest guests on ProGRESS, the podcast promoting green, ethical, sustainable and socially responsible careers. The podcast was set up with the notion that listeners might like tips and ideas for how to follow in guests’ footsteps if they wanted to do something similar. As time has gone on, and 50 episodes in, it’s apparent that...

Drawn to both science and the arts when she was at school, Reena Mahajan’s studies and work took her to three continents. She studied architecture in New Delhi before moving to Paris to study urban planning and sustainable development. When she moved to Uruguay, she broadened her horizons and studies into gender responsive design and children-friendly planning. Now a strong advocate for sustainabl...

Sarah Flynn is a career coach who works with purpose-led, empathic leaders making a difference to the world. In addition, Sarah teaches resilience for sustainability leaders on the Cambridge sustainability leaders masters. Discussing her own squiggly career journey, Sarah explains how she felt when she discovered psychology as a teenager and then became inspired to study it in depth, thinking she’...

When he was young Matteo Menapace spent many afternoons playing video games and learnt to code so he could hack his first game.  So how does a kid playing video games (with a Saturday job making pizzas) turn his hobby into a professional career that challenges people to think about the most pressing issues of the era, including climate change? Listen to hear the philosophy and ethics behind s...

Johnathon Miller-McCall grew up in South London, seemingly an unpromising location for wildlife observation and a career as a conservationist, science communicator and storyteller. Yet, Johnathon reveals, there are more than 14,000 species in the city, and it’s one of the world’s largest urban forests – you just need to know where to look. Now Johnathan wears three hats, working as a comms and eng...

 Connor Cashell combines his socially responsible and ethical values with a push for sustainability and a job campaigning for Cycling UK. After university Connor worked in Belgium where he facilitated meetings between European leaders and the people who really understood what was going on in exploited mining communities, particularly in South America. From there, it wasn’t a huge step to move...

There's no doubt that Dr Fernanda da Silva Tatley's scientific career has been one of purpose. A medical molecular microbiologist, she’s researched tuberculosis (TB), listeria and cancer, working with Glaxo Wellcome, then enabled other researchers as an account manager for Roche Diagnostics.  Delve a little deeper and there’s a tale of a thwarted career however – she’d have liked to be an arc...

Still in his early twenties Matthew Payne parked his career plans and degree course to work for a tech start-up to try, as he puts it, to fix the National Health Service.  Matthew was due to finish his final undergraduate year and had ticked all the boxes to make himself a good candidate for a well-paid traineeship in corporate law. So what drives a person to work in a tech start-up facing su...

What’s funny about climate change, you might think if you spot comedian Stuart Goldsmith’s job title. The answer is, of course, nothing, but after a long and successful career as a performer and stand-up comedian Stuart found himself wanting to talk about just one thing - climate change. So how does that pan out when you need to be paid for laughs? And who is in the audience when Stuart is deliver...

Katie Goldsbrough is a woodland officer, ecologist, conservationist and bat carer. She’s passionate about the outdoors, something that started in childhood and guided her through university, where she studied for a degree in zoology. Aware of the masses of plastic tree guards used when planting saplings, which are rarely documented or removed when the trees start growing and which degrade and frag...

Duncan Goose, the founder of Global Ethics and the brand One Water, returned to ProGRESS to talk about what has happened in the 12 months since we last spoke, including why he undertook a round Britain road trip to echo the world tour he was on more than 20 years ago that changed his career direction. Duncan also speaks about tracking down the girl (now woman) who sparked his mission to bring wate...

In this wide-reaching discussion, ProGRESS's first-ever guest Rae Wilkinson rejoins the podcast to tell Sandra more about her career as an award-winning sustainable landscape and garden designer. Recording from her studio at the Knepp Estate in Sussex, Rae talks about introducing her clients to sustainable design and the notion of reducing carbon footprint as well as managing the budget when creat...

Sustainability consultant and environmental educator Maddie Booth started her first enterprise while at the University of Warwick, where she was studying for a Bachelor of Arts and Science (BASc) in global sustainable development and politics.   In the spirit of no experience is wasted, Maddie says being an entrepreneur has been the biggest talking point in every job interview she’s had...

James Adeleke thought his future lay in football, but a serious injury meant he had to rethink his plans (much to his mum's relief) and study law instead. In this episode James talks about how meeting a homeless man after the London Riots affected his thinking, what turned his society at law school into the social enterprise Generation Success and why his mum has forgiven him for not following a l...

An absolute livewire, Divya Kumar is a community engagement manager for Earthwatch Europe , responsible for overseeing Tiny Forests around the UK. She aims to hit the 300 mark by the end of 2025 and now describes herself as a socio-environmentalist. But when Divya was younger, though she had dreams of becoming a veterinarian or an animator, her parents encouraged her towards a corporate career. Di...

David Kohnstamm is a thermal engineer and the chief sustainability officer and co–founder of Leafcloud , which offers its clients a truly green alternative to energy-hungry traditional data centres.  David is scathing about the misleading use of the word ‘cloud’ to describe most data centres , since they are not the nebulous things that the word conjures up. The reality is much more solid – h...

Zoologist, microbiologist and science champion Dr Bushra Schuitemaker has carved out a career in research and is determined to ensure young people from disadvantaged backgrounds know that science is for them too. Bushra’s stella science career is all the more remarkable because her local secondary school offered pupils no opportunities at all to take science A level courses. Now the school has ful...

Dr Mark Sumner was one of ProGRESS's earliest guests, so his 2025 return to the podcast to talk about the latest developments in his career feels like a seal of approval. Mark talks about leaving Leeds University's School of Design at the end of the 2024 academic year in favour of a new role at WRAP , the Waste and Resources Action Programme. WRAP is a not-for profit, non-governmental organis...

Business leader Justin Kelly stepped away from his C-suite role at the international engineering and technology company Siemens in 2022 and is now chief executive at Glass Futures, a not-for-profit tech membership organisation. Glass Futures researches more sustainable glass manufacture across the globe, so this role fits well with Justin’s other recent appointment, chair of Sustainable Ventures N...