Climate Unbound

What we exist for

Welcome to Climate Unbound, a non-profit innovation organization dedicated to accelerating the implementation of innovative solutions to address climate change.

Climate Unbound empowers multiple stakeholders to co-create and rapid expand beneficial solutions to climate change. We prioritize the health and welfare of local communities by directly involving the voices, concerns, and life experiences of impacted stakeholders in the innovation to implementation process. At Climate Unbound, we promote the notion that collaborative processes in which people co-create innovative solutions are needed to build a sustainable future for all.

We understand that the world needs countless innovations serving people and the planet to be rapidly implemented, but the current processes of getting innovations to market discourage co-learning and collaboration between innovators, communities, technical advisors, government agencies and other contributors and stakeholders. Many of the decision processes for implementing innovation create conflict and stalemates rather than a collective wisdom that includes the best of all the perspectives. This often leads to missed opportunities to mitigate climate change and serve the health and welfare of communities.

The fastest way to implement climate innovations may be the most inclusive way. To serve the health and welfare of communities and mitigate climate change everywhere, we need processes of co-learning and collaboration that lead to the implementation of innovative and highly beneficial solutions that can be permitted and built to serve the health and welfare of people and the planet. 

How we achieve our mission

In the practical challenge of getting beneficial innovation projects properly assessed, revised or rejected, and the best ones implemented through improved processes, we will promote and test the idea that collaborative, participative and co-learning processes that engage multiple perspectives can speed the process. To do this, Climate Unbound will study, develop and implement educational and collaborative processes that accelerate the adoption of innovations that genuinely benefit communities and the planet.

  1. Identifying innovations: Working with multiple stakeholders, we identify and analyze for consideration innovative ways to prevent pollution, build green, healthy, and sustainable communities, and mitigate climate change while reducing and eliminating the use of fossil fuels. (For instance, we may identify urban land reform as both a climate and social justice action.)
  2. Educating for expanded perspectives: We design and carry out collaborative processes for mutual education, collaboration, and fact-finding between key stakeholders to determine the benefits or liabilities of the climate-positive innovations at the community level. (In the example of urban land reform, a curated group studies urban infill benefits and challenges and develops educational materials.)
  3. Multi-stakeholder implementation processes: The next step is to redesign and support processes between the innovators, funders, community representatives and government agents to get the vetted innovations permitted and built. (In the urban land reform, curated groups co-design and recommend equitable ways to allow increased infill housing in the local or state jurisdictions.)

These processes follow the model of participative action research, engaging people impacted in the discovery of better routes to changes, in this case ones that simultaneously serve the climate and communities. People’s lived experience, justice considerations, technical and environmental perspectives are all needed to assess the benefits of climate innovations. Wise decisions on the benefits of proposed innovations require multiple stakeholders to put their individual perspectives together within collaborative processes so they can serve the wider systems, natural and human, that climate change is threatening.

Scaling the learning of Climate Unbound

The innovative processes and implementations that emerge at the local level can serve as a model to accelerate the implementation and scaling of other locally beneficial and globally climate-positive innovations. One longer-term aim is to model ways to equitably open the flow of beneficial climate and health innovations through the essential guardrails of the permitting process. We help communities and innovators discover ways to build more communication and collaboration between stakeholders into the process to mutually shape innovative projects, rather than waiting to engage in legal actions.

When local communities, innovators, scientists, NGOs, government agencies and other stakeholders work together to find innovative ways to mitigate climate change and promote environmental health and justice, we can build a healthier, more sustainable future for all.

Who we are

LIBBA PINCHOT, PHD

My passion is supporting leaders in reinventing their organizations and communities for resilience by empowering employees, entrepreneurs, and community members to out-create risks and innovate for a better ..

GIFFORD PINCHOT III

Gifford Pinchot III has a long career as an environmentalist and social justice activist. He is also an author, consultant, social entrepreneur and thought leader. He has co-founded five companies and NGOs.

Connect Us

If you’ve got a question about  our initiatives or anything else, please get in touch.

More about us

Scroll to Top

Gifford Pinchot III

Gifford Pinchot III has a long career as an environmentalist and social justice activist. He is also an author, consultant, social entrepreneur and thought leader. He has co-founded five companies and NGOs. He coined the word intrapreneur with his wife, Libba, and they wrote the book that started the intrapreneurship movement. Intrapreneuring: Why You Don’t Have to Leave the Corporation to Become an Entrepreneur (1985) explained how the intrapreneurial spirit can flourish within larger organizations to the benefit of both the company and the employees. The book was a NY Times bestseller and published in 15 languages. The Intelligent Organization, written with his wife, Libba, took intrapreneuring a step further, to include empowering organizational changes that allow all employees to lead with their values. Since 1983, Mr. Pinchot and his wife Libba have led Pinchot & Company, a consulting and training business that has served over half of the Fortune 100 and helped them to launch over 700 new products and businesses. The company delivers live and online learning and accelerators as well as coaching and cultural interventions to increase innovation.

In 2002, the Pinchots co-founded and led the Bainbridge Graduate Institute (BGI), the first school to offer an MBA in Sustainable Business. In 2016, BGI merged with Presidio Graduate School which is now the Presidio Center for Sustainable Solutions based in the Marin campus of The University of Redlands.

Mr. Pinchot has received numerous awards in his lifetime, among them, Executive Excellence, listing him in the top 20 of leadership thinkers. In 2009 he was awarded the Olympus Lifetime Education Award and in 2010 he and his wife were both named Purpose Prize fellows. In 1965 Mr. Pinchot graduated from Harvard University with honors in Economics and completed all-but-dissertation in a PhD program in Behavioral Physiology at Johns Hopkins. He can be found online via Intrapreneuring.com, BetterWorldVisionaries.com, and https://www.linkedin.com/in/giffordpinchot/

Libba Pinchot, Phd

My passion is supporting leaders in reinventing their organizations and communities for resilience by empowering employees, entrepreneurs, and community members to out-create risks and innovate for a better world for all. Through my work with Pinchot & Company, an intrapreneurship consultancy, I have advised and trained leaders in half of the Fortune 100 as well as in many NGOs and government agencies, creating widespread engagement in product, process, and cultural innovations, to create resilient futures for organizations, their people, and

all they influence. I have also advised or been a principal in numerous startups in the areas of manufacturing, government, service, technology, and education.

I consult with social and environmental entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, innovators, government agents, and activists to accelerate the engagement of all stakeholders in collaborative innovations needed to foster a better future for all. In addition to innovation consulting for organizations and projects that benefit people and the planet, I offer private coaching for selected leaders.

 

My current research focuses in two areas. First, as Climate Unbound exemplifies, our action research focuses on accelerating the implementation of innovative solutions to address climate change via collaborative processes in which stakeholders from differing affiliations co-create ways to build a sustainable, just future for all.  Second, within larger public and private organizations, I study collaborative, cross-functional intrapreneurship, and the application of intrapreneurship in driving highly effective environmental and social sustainability initiatives. I am also mentoring cross-organizational groups of intrapreneurial leaders to accelerate solutions to systemic economic, social, and environmental problems.

I co-founded the Bainbridge Graduate Institute (BGI) (merged with Presidio Graduate School) where MBA students develop into innovators, bringing sustainability, social equity and prosperous resilience to their organizations and the world. In 2016, BGI merged with Presidio Graduate School which is now the Presidio Center for Sustainable Solutions based in the Marin campus of The University of Redlands.

I have degrees in philosophy, education, and systems psychology from Wellesley/Stanford, the U. of Oregon and Goddard, and a PhD in organizational systems from Saybrook University. I have been awarded a Purpose Prize, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Social Venture Network and the Dissertation of the Year in Organizational Systems and Change.

I co-authored The Intelligent Organization: Engaging the Talent and Initiative of Everyone in the Workplace and wrote the PhD dissertation, Learning with Corporate Sustainability Leaders: Systemic Barriers and Collaborative Openings to Addressing Climate Change.

I can be found online via Intrapreneuring.com, BetterWorldVisionaries.com, and https://www.linkedin.com/in/libba-pinchot-phd/