Women With Non-Linear Careers in Sustainability: A Toronto Climate Week Event Recap

Co-hosted by The SustainabilityX® Magazine x Good Principles™ | A Toronto Climate Week Official Event

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Summary

The Toronto Climate Week official event "Women with Non-Linear Careers in Sustainability", co-hosted by Good Principles™ and The SustainabilityX® Magazine, brought together women leaders whose careers have crossed law, engineering, business, media, climate communications, advocacy, public policy, entrepreneurship, and social justice. Through personal reflections from Katie Elder, Supriya Verma, Tara Milburn, Jennifer Turliuk, Dr. Dianne Saxe, Senator Rosa Galvez, Sylvia Yu Friedman, and Jaclyn Whittal, the event explored how non-linear pathways are not detours from sustainability leadership, but often the very experiences that help women connect dots across complex systems. The conversation highlighted resilience, transferable skills, representation, allyship, storytelling, climate accountability, and the need to create more spaces for women entering sustainability through unconventional paths.The SustainabilityX® Magazine was proud to co-host Women with Non-Linear Careers in Sustainability with Good Principles™, creating space to explore the diverse pathways, transferable skills, and lived experiences shaping women’s leadership in sustainability.

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Women with Non-Linear Careers in Sustainability, co-hosted by Good Principles and The SustainabilityX® Magazine as part of Toronto Climate Week, brought together women whose careers have crossed disciplines, industries, countries, life stages, and forms of leadership.

A hybrid event held in person at the Smith School of Business, Queen’s University Toronto Campus, and streamed online to virtual attendees, the event attracted a strong response before it even began. Registrations came in quickly, messages continued after the session, and one central idea clearly resonated with participants:

A non-linear career is not a failure to follow the right path. In sustainability, it may be the path that prepares us best.

The event was co-hosted by Katie Elder, Founder of Good Principles, and Supriya Verma, Founder of The SustainabilityX® Magazine, and author of Bold Women, Sustainable Futures: Leadership Lessons in an Age of Resistance (2026).

Together, they created a space for women to speak not only about where they had arrived, but about the pivots, setbacks, risks, detours, reinventions, and acts of courage that shaped how they got there.

The full event can be viewed on The SustainabilityX® Magazine's YouTube channel here.

Reframing the Non-Linear Career

Katie Elder opened the event by acknowledging the traditional lands upon which participants were gathering and thanking the many volunteers, technical partners, panelists, Toronto Climate Week organizers, and the Smith School of Business team who helped make the hybrid event possible.

She then reflected on why the event had generated such strong interest.

“I think a non-linear career in sustainability is actually the typical career,” she told the audience.

Katie’s own path has moved through global marketing, governance, business, sustainability education, consulting, and board leadership. She spoke about “dream jobs” not as a title or destination, but as work that feels aligned with one’s values.

That idea became one of the first major themes of the day: a career can feel meaningful not because it follows a predictable ladder, but because each experience reveals something about what matters, what no longer fits, and where one’s skills can be of greater service.

Katie encouraged participants to rethink the stories they tell about their careers, both publicly and privately.

The work, she suggested, is not only to “repackage” one’s experience for others, but to retell it to oneself in a way that is motivating, coherent, and grounded in purpose.

A Decade of Work, a Book, and a Personal Journey

For Supriya Verma, the event was also part of the book tour for Bold Women, Sustainable Futures, launched during Women’s Month in March 2026.

She described the event as deeply personal because it brought together many strands of her own life and work: sustainability, women’s leadership, climate action, social justice, storytelling, empathy, courage, and leading differently in an age of resistance.

The SustainabilityX® Magazine is marking its 10th anniversary this year, alongside the 5th annual Global 50 Women In Sustainability Awards™. For the past decade, the magazine’s work has been rooted in connecting the environment, economy, society, and governance through dialogue, while amplifying women shaping a more just and sustainable future.

In many ways, Bold Women, Sustainable Futures is the culmination of that work.

The book begins with nine in-depth profiles of women leaders, including Supriya’s own story, followed by a fulcrum chapter in which 16 women answer the question:

How do we move forward in a world moving backwards?

The second half explores practical pathways for leading through resistance, including healing as a leadership strategy, authenticity, empathy, community, representation, resilience, and the need to keep moving forward even when progress is contested.

Several of the event’s virtual panelists were already connected to that work. Dr. Dianne Saxe, the Honourable Senator Rosa Galvez, and Sylvia Yu Friedman are featured in the book, while Jaclyn Whittal is expected to contribute to Supriya’s next book on allyship and bridging the gender divide in leadership. All four are past recipients of the magazine's Global 50 Women In Sustainability Awards™.

Supriya also shared her own non-linear path: from an Honours Bachelor of Science in Kinesiology and a minor in Business at McMaster University, into engineering and construction, then publishing, sustainability leadership, awards, and authorship.

Her message to the audience was direct:

“You do not have to go from A to B. You can go from A to C to B, and that is perfectly fine.”

She offered three lessons from her own journey.

First, non-linearity can be a strength. Sustainability itself is interdisciplinary. Climate, health, business, infrastructure, food systems, finance, justice, governance, and social inclusion cannot be addressed in isolation. A person who has moved across sectors may be especially equipped to connect the dots others miss.

Second, women must choose progress over perfection. Fear of being judged, unqualified, unpolished, or “not ready” can delay action. But perfection is not a real standard. Progress begins when women stop postponing their own participation.

Third, leaders must learn to “be the lighthouse.”

For Supriya, the lighthouse has become a metaphor for authentic leadership in an age of uncertainty: standing tall, remaining anchored in one’s values, and continuing to shine despite personal, professional, and political winds.

“How do we lead without losing ourselves?” she asked.

Her answer was not to harden, shrink, or perform. It was to remain rooted.

Tara Milburn: Taking the Long Way Around

The first in-person panelist, Tara Milburn, Founder and CEO of Ethical Swag, described herself as someone who had taken “the long way around” to sustainability.

Her career began in social services in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, where an intense early experience exposed her to the realities faced by vulnerable communities and the responsibility to notice who is being overlooked.

From there, her path moved into major sports and entertainment initiatives, including work connected to the NBA’s first international expansion into Canada and the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games.

She recalled entering rooms in the 1990s where women were visibly absent and where business conversations were largely focused on revenue. A turning point came when she heard The Body Shop founder speak about people, planet, and profit being held in equal measure.

That language stayed with her.

Years later, after motherhood, ageing parents, several industries, and a long accumulation of experience, Tara founded Ethical Swag in her 50s.

She offered the audience a different metaphor for non-linearity: not a broken line, but something organic.

A stream, she said, adapts to the landscape. It moves around obstacles and eventually finds a way.

She also invoked the bee, which does not travel in a perfectly straight line when searching. It wanders first, discovers what it needs, and then returns with purpose.

Her career, she said, had taken the long route. She would not change it.

Jennifer Turliuk: Learning, Layering, and Following the Work That Needs Doing

Jennifer Turliuk, President of Koru Labs, Climate and AI Lecturer at MIT, and Executive Fellow at Harvard Business School, began her career in corporate marketing at Procter & Gamble.

She quickly realized it was not the right fit.

Rather than waiting for a traditional next step, she left, flew to Silicon Valley, cold-emailed entrepreneurs she admired, and asked if she could shadow them. That self-directed education helped her identify entrepreneurship as her next path.

Jennifer went on to co-found a STEM education company that taught coding and robotics to children. Years later, when wildfire smoke in Toronto prevented children from going outside, she began to see the urgency of climate work differently.

That moment changed the trajectory of her career.

She moved into climate-tech investing, completed a mid-career MBA at MIT, worked in climate and energy AI, began teaching at MIT and Harvard, studied AI’s climate impacts, and later entered law school to deepen her work in climate justice, technology governance, and public-interest law.

Her path has moved across business, entrepreneurship, venture capital, education, climate tech, policy, law, AI governance, and justice.

Jennifer acknowledged that non-linear careers are not easy. But she also offered the audience something practical: a way of visually mapping a career by showing both the main path and the layers added over time, including research, teaching, speaking, policy, technology, and law.

She encouraged participants to consider their own “climate Venn diagram”:

What brings you joy? What are you good at? What work needs doing? Sustainability, she reminded the audience, needs all kinds of skills.

Dianne Saxe: Do Not Give Up

Joining virtually, Dr. Dianne Saxe delivered one of the most candid and powerful accounts of the day.

Now a Toronto City Councillor for Ward 11, University–Rosedale, and formerly the Environmental Commissioner of Ontario, Dianne’s career has included law, government, private practice, environmental policy, entrepreneurship, public service, and politics.

But that journey was marked repeatedly by exclusion, workplace hostility, institutional barriers, dismissal, and the loss of roles she had worked hard to build.

She began her legal career in tax law because she loved complexity and mathematics, but soon discovered that the work often served clients and purposes that conflicted with her values.

She attempted to move into public service, encountered discrimination, was removed from a role while on maternity leave, and spent years trying to find her way into environmental law.

It took approximately a decade to secure the environmental work she truly wanted.

Later, she faced toxic leadership within government, returned to school for a PhD, entered private practice, and eventually created her own firm. After 25 years, she left that practice to become Environmental Commissioner of Ontario, only to have the office abolished through legislation.

Today, she continues the work as a city councillor.

Her story was not one of effortless resilience. It was a story of repeated loss, rebuilding, and persistence.

Her advice was simple:

“If you’re not on the path you want, don’t give up.”

She encouraged participants to keep developing skills, pursue volunteer opportunities, build relationships, and move closer to the work that matters whenever an opening appears.

Her message also carried urgency. In the face of climate breakdown, she said, the world does not merely need optimism.

“We need heroes.”

Senator Rosa Galvez: Sustainability Is a Shared Endeavour

The Honourable Senator Rosa Galvez described herself as a “salmon,” always swimming against the current and becoming stronger through resistance.

Born in Peru, she studied engineering in a program of approximately 500 men and only one woman. She later moved to Canada, built a career across civil and environmental engineering, research, academia, public policy, and eventually the Senate of Canada.

She did not initially set out to build a “career in sustainability.” Rather, she followed the problems that demanded attention: housing, waste, energy systems, contaminated sites, biodiversity loss, climate change, infrastructure, and human health.

Over time, she saw that legislation and policy were essential to accelerating the changes science already showed were necessary.

She also challenged conventional economic thinking. Endless growth, she argued, cannot be reconciled with a finite planet. Measures such as GDP may rise even amid war and destruction, but they do not necessarily reflect peace, health, prosperity, or well-being.

What is needed instead are people who can connect science with policy, finance with ecology, and prosperity with social justice.

Senator Galvez also spoke openly about motherhood, the pressures placed on women in technical careers, and the experience of carrying professional responsibilities even while breastfeeding and raising children.

Now a mother and grandmother, she considers future generations in every decision she makes.

Her closing message to women was unequivocal:

“Yes, you belong.”

Whether in science, engineering, business, politics, finance, law, education, agriculture, technology, or community leadership, sustainability needs women’s talent, creativity, and leadership.

“Sustainability is not a solo project,” she said. “It is a shared endeavour.”

Sylvia Yu Friedman: When the Tomb Becomes a Womb

Sylvia Yu Friedman, an award-winning author, speaker, filmmaker, and pioneer in anti-trafficking advocacy in Asia, framed her story around humility, trustworthiness, and the question: “Why not?”

Her career began in local journalism in British Columbia, but later expanded into investigative journalism, filmmaking, philanthropy, anti-trafficking advocacy, private equity, book services, and work with some of the world’s most influential families.

Her non-linear path was shaped by a profound personal turning point.

While living in Beijing, she went through a painful divorce and found herself far from the communities and people who had known her for years. What initially felt like a tomb, she said, eventually became a womb — a greenhouse for new dreams.

That experience stripped away many of the identities she had relied upon and led her to focus on helping women and children facing far more severe forms of suffering.

She began investigating trafficking networks in Asia, funding anti-trafficking projects, producing documentary films, and mobilizing people through storytelling. In Hong Kong, she and her husband helped lead a movement that reached more than 25,000 people across government, universities, and civil society.

Her work placed her in dangerous situations, including one in which she believed she might lose her life.

That experience, she said, gave her a new sense of fearlessness.

She encouraged participants to take calculated risks, step outside their comfort zones, and stop treating imposter syndrome only as evidence that they do not belong.

Sometimes, she suggested, imposter syndrome means you are growing.

Jaclyn Whittal: The Power of Experience Over the Power of a Report

Jaclyn Whittal, Founder and CEO of One Earth Communications, began her career not in meteorology or climate communications, but as a professional singer and musical theatre performer.

For 11 years, she toured, performed internationally, and released rock albums with her husband.

Media later became a natural extension of her stage experience, and her childhood fascination with severe weather led her to study meteorology and eventually join Global News and The Weather Network.

A chance invitation from a storm chaser altered the course of her career. For the next 15 years, she reported on some of the world’s most extreme weather, including hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and climate-related disasters.

But she often left those places and returned to the safety of home.

That distance disappeared after she moved to British Columbia.

During the province’s historic heat dome, fires, and atmospheric river events, she found herself living under evacuation alert, sweeping embers from her own back porch while a massive wildfire burned nearby.

The experience changed her understanding of communication.

It showed her, she said, “the power of experience over the power of a report.”

People may forget data or media coverage, but they remember what happens in their own communities.

Jaclyn also shared an encounter with a person whose political views differed significantly from her own. Rather than insisting upon the language of climate change, she listened and found common ground around one undeniable truth: things were changing.

That conversation later inspired a documentary.

Her message was that climate communication is not only about what we say. It is about how we connect.

Today, through One Earth Communications, she helps organizations tell human-centred stories about climate risk, sustainability, extreme weather, and preparedness.

Her own path — from music to media, meteorology, storm reporting, sustainability education, entrepreneurship, and climate communications — was another reminder that the skills acquired along the way are rarely wasted.

What the Panel Revealed

Taken together, the panelists’ stories crossed law, tax, public service, engineering, academia, finance, journalism, media, philanthropy, social services, entrepreneurship, technology, climate science, entertainment, policy, advocacy, and politics.

Yet each path eventually converged around sustainability.

That was perhaps the most important lesson of the event.

Sustainability is not one profession.

It is a way of connecting people, systems, values, risks, decisions, and futures.

The women on this panel did not arrive because they followed an identical roadmap. They arrived because they kept listening to what their experiences were teaching them.

They changed direction when their work no longer aligned with their values.

They began again when institutions closed doors.

They followed questions that could not be ignored.

They took risks.

They built new skills.

They used earlier experiences in ways they could not always have predicted.

And they continued.

The Conversation Is Not Over

As the event closed, Katie Elder reflected on the decision to move beyond the usual sound-bite panel format and give each woman space to tell her story.

One participant also asked whether the organizers, Supriya and Katie, might create a network or group for women transitioning into climate and sustainability through non-linear careers.

Both co-hosts expressed interest.

That question may be one of the most important outcomes of the event.

The strong registration response, active virtual audience, messages received afterward, and desire for more discussion all suggest that this was not simply a one-time panel topic.

There is a need for deeper spaces where women can:

• understand how their existing experience fits into sustainability;

• learn how to communicate transferable skills;

• connect with mentors, sponsors, and allies;

• find opportunities to enter or advance in climate work;

• hear honest stories about pivots, setbacks, and reinvention;

• and recognize that there is no single profile of a sustainability leader.

The recording of the event can be viewed on our YouTube channel, and continued coverage will be shared through The SustainabilityX® Magazine, with more similar events being planned for Climate Week NYC 2026 in September.

But the larger opportunity is to continue building the conversation itself.

Because as the panel showed, the future of sustainability will not be shaped only by those who followed a straight path.

It will be shaped by those who crossed disciplines, adapted to change, turned setbacks into insight, and learned to lead from the intersections.

The future is not linear.

And perhaps it was never meant to be.

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As a proud media partner of Toronto Climate Week, The SustainabilityX® Magazine was honoured to support coverage of this important gathering and amplify the flagship conversations that unfolded across the city.

For SustainabilityX®, this partnership is especially meaningful. As the magazine marks its 10th anniversary year and the 5th year of the Global 50 Women In Sustainability Awards™, Toronto Climate Week reflects many of the values that have shaped our work since the beginning: dialogue, systems thinking, inclusion, women’s leadership, economic transformation, environmental responsibility, and the belief that sustainability must connect people, planet, policy, business, and possibility.

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About The SustainabilityX® Magazine

The SustainabilityX® Magazine is an award-winning, digital, female-founded, and female-led non-profit initiative bringing the environment and economy together for a sustainable future through dialogue, and now transforming the environment and economy for a sustainable future through the power of women's leadership. Founded on May 8, 2016, and inspired by the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals by Canada's Top 30 Under 30 in Sustainability Leadership awardee and author of "Bold Women, Sustainable Futures: Leadership Lessons in an Age of Resistance" (2026), Supriya Verma, the digital media initiative focuses on approaching the world's most pressing challenges with a holistic, integrated, systems-based perspective as opposed to the traditional and ineffective siloed approach with a single lens on interdisciplinary topics like climate and energy. This initiative ultimately seeks to explore how to effectively bring the environment and economy together through intellectual, insightful dialogue and thought-provoking discussion amongst individuals across sectors taking an interdisciplinary and integrated approach to untangling the intricate web of sustainability while championing women's leadership in sustainability.

The SustainabilityX® Magazine is built upon the four foundational pillars of sustainability: Environmental Stewardship, which emphasizes the importance of improving environmental health; Economic Prosperity, which promotes sustainable economic growth that transcends traditional capitalist models; Social Inclusion, which focuses on equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) for BIPOC, LGBTQ, and other marginalized or vulnerable communities; and Just Governance, which highlights responsible leadership, the equal application of the rule of law, and the creation of fair systems for all.

As we expand our mission to align with the Women's Empowerment Principles (WEPs), we continue to explore the diverse and interconnected factors that influence sustainability. By recognizing how these elements interact across local, national, and international levels, we aim to accelerate progress toward sustainability goals. In essence, this aligns with The SustainabilityX® Magazine's vision of integrating environmental and economic progress for a more just, inclusive, and sustainable future through thoughtful dialogue.

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