Kristy Drutman was a high school student in New Jersey in 2013 when she heard the news about Super Typhoon Haiyan's devastating impact on the Philippines, her mother's home country. The typhoon, one of the worst the world has ever seen, killed more than 6,300 people. "It was my wake-up moment," recalls Drutman.
She awoke to the havoc that a changing climate is starting to have on the world, and the ways it hits some people harder than others. That realization started her on a journey that has made Drutman, now 27, a social-media influencer advocating for diversity and equity in environmentalism—and an entrepreneur whose much-watched business, Green Jobs Board, provides an important tool for that cause.
Drutman studied environmental policy at the University of California in Berkeley but felt something was missing from the program, as well as from much of the climate-change movement. "I didn't see people who looked like me, and I didn't see myself reflected in the people we were talking about," she says. "And I felt like a fish out of water in the environmental activist spaces."
To address the problem, Drutman took to Instagram as BrownGirl_Green to make her case. "As someone coming from a Jewish and Filipino background, I wanted to bring a multiracial, multicultural voice to environmentalism," she says. Her posts and her Brown Girl Green podcast call out activists who unfairly blame environmental woes on poorer Asian countries, highlight Tonga's fight against deep-sea mining, support indigenous women joining the climate fight, and rail against "environmental racism."
To her surprise, her following kept growing. It hit nearly 75,000 followers by the time she had graduated. That success put her on the environmental speaking and consulting circuit—a good thing, because she was having trouble finding a job in line with her environmental activism interests. "Within two years of graduating college, I was a full-time entrepreneur," she says. But that got her wondering: Why was it so hard for young people, and especially those of color, to get a job in the environmental field?
She started searching out job opportunities in the field, posting them on her Instagram feed. "Engagement with those posts was the highest I had ever seen," she says. "And people were starting to get hired because of them." When environmentally aligned organizations looking to improve their own diversity hiring started contacting her about getting in on the posts, Drutman decided to team up with a friend to spin the effort off as its own business.
The Green Jobs Board attracted thousands of visitors in its first week. Soon organizations, both profit and nonprofit, were lining up to pay for the privilege of posting jobs there. "Environmental organizations haven't always been able to reach diverse talent," she says. "We're reaching those people, and they trust us."
Green Jobs Board gives extra attention to attracting and highlighting environmental businesses owned by individuals who are Black, Indigenous, or people of color, notes Drutman. But she says she'll work with any type of organization that wants to support environmentalism and diversity—including companies that may face criticism from environmentalists. "As long as they're committed to learning and doing better, it's better to engage them in the conversation rather than just 'X'ing them out," she says.
Drutman emphasizes that the year-old, six-employee company is just getting started. She's exploring options to bring in investors who would help her expand, and possibly spin off other ventures. But she insists that any venture she leads will remain laser-focused on her core mission of promoting diversity in environmentalism. "I always see this field through the lens of equity issues," she says. That lens is especially apparent in her recently revamped podcasts, which feature diverse environmental leaders from around the world.
Another guiding principle of her budding media micro-empire: Inject some lightness into the mix. "There's so much climate anxiety and despair out there, and I don't want to contribute to that," she says. "It's important to have humor and humanity in there as well. That's why I often show myself being silly and having fun in my posts." So far, it's been a winning mix.
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