Susanna Sutherland | Principal

Susanna Sutherland | Principal

Susanna founded Sutherland & Associates (S&A) in 2013 to help communities address climate change. She and her team primarily design funding programs for networks and funder collaboratives, overseeing selection processes and working with grantee teams through to impact reporting.

Communities use these funds to transform the systems that people use everyday – like water, energy, housing, waste, and transportation – to be cleaner, more efficient, healthier, more affordable, and more resilient to planetary changes. Grants ultimately catalyze culture change, shifting processes over time.

To date, S&A has overseen over 780 projects representing $72 million in climate investments. These awards have leveraged an additional $2.9 billion in matched funding for local climate work around the globe. 

Susanna has worked across public and private sectors at every level of this challenge. Thus far, the journey has taken her from (1) state water system field work, to (2) federal energy system management, to (3) local government sustainability office creation, to (4) forming a private company that starts networks and moves philanthropic funds within and across the most impactful climate organizations around the world. She has a life long learning philosophy and is often asked to guide executive directors, boards, collaboratives, and organizations going through strategy and growth changes.

Susanna spent the first part of her career learning exactly how the physical systems that we rely on work now, and how they must adapt to support us in the future. She has spent the second half building a deep understanding of how to navigate the surrounding and ever changing social systems of philanthropy and politics.

Her deep expertise sits at the intersection of water, energy, climate – a focus she has pursued with unwavering consistency over more than two decades. Susanna holds a doctorate in Energy Science and Engineering, completed while she was simultaneously building S&A and serving as a founding partner of the Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance. She also more formally established the Southeast Sustainability Directors Network during this time, working to fill regional and global professional infrastructure gaps. All of this was a crash course in starting, running, and sustaining organizations that grow to be much greater than any one individual.

From her first professional job, she was good at bringing in resources:

The foundation of her career was built in watershed health. After graduating with her masters in Biosystems Engineering, she obtained $1.5 million in restoration grants for the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Environmental Policy division in her first year there. She moved to TVA’s River Operations and Environment division, where she joined a round-the-clock team of civil engineers scheduling river flows across 7 states – learning how to balance the system for competing uses like water supply, energy creation, and recreation.

Because of her river knowledge, she was hired to oversee the final design of the City of Knoxville, Tennessee’s waterfront redevelopment plan. She managed property acquisition, construction projects, and secured $1.5 million in state and federal funding for Brownfield reclamation in the 2 years before she was tapped by the Mayor to start a Sustainability Office with federal start-up funding.

During her 4-year tenure in this role, she secured $2.5 million in grants, delivered $1 million in new infrastructure, and put in place efficiency measures that continue to save the city $1.4 million annually in utility costs. She also contributed to field-building publications with organizations like the National Research Council, which is what led her back to school to get her doctorate.

Starting her firm led to putting in the 10,000 hours necessary to become expert in understanding the constraints and flexibilities of systems, policies, and giving strategies around climate work. This is what makes her so successful in unlocking resources for any effort she is lifting up. Being highly organized and process driven makes this skill replicable and teachable to others who are also willing to learn – and who treat people with kindness and respect in their daily interactions.

S&A can’t help people who are rude or lax with follow-through, because the giving world won’t open up to them for very long. But for those who are friendly, open, and willing to change, Susanna is expert at helping them succeed in their endeavors by designing processes for them that play to these strengths.

Education | The University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Publications

Articles | Primary Author

Books | Contributing Author

In Harm's Way
Big Data for Regional Science
Acting as if Tomorrow Matters: Accelerating the Transition to Sustainability.
Sustainability and the U.S. EPA