Advisory Board Member
Johanna brings over 20 years of experience launching, leading, and transforming organizations and initiatives dedicated to the public good and a healthy planet. She champions this work alongside a broad network of partners and change-makers, and draws on her expertise as a trained mediator, facilitator, and nonprofit board member.
In addition to advising global nonprofits on organizational growth, strategic change, and key collaborations, she works with leaders and philanthropists at critical inflection points. Her services include strategic advice, assessment, governance, partnerships, fundraising, and facilitation. Recent partners include the More Than Human Life (MOTH) Program and the Future of Rights & Governance (FORGE) Program at New York University School of Law, SPUN.EARTH, Project CETI, and more.
Johanna also served as the President and CEO of the Union of Concerned Scientists from 2020 to 2023 where she led a major organizational transformation and 5-year strategy refresh, integrating equity with science and driving significant policy wins in climate, clean energy, and food justice.
Her career began as a community organizer advocating alongside smallholder farmers, workers, and vendors globally. She holds a BA with distinction in Anthropology from Stanford University and an MPA from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
Multisolving Institute is a project of the New Venture Fund
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That opened a new front of research at Climate Interactive: what else would improve around the world if countries truly transitioned away from fossil fuels? From improvements in air quality to energy security we documented many co-benefits of climate action, and incorporated some of them into Climate Interactive’s well known computer simulation, En-ROADS.
But, the multiple benefits of actions to protect the climate remain mostly theoretical without ways of overcoming the obstacles to multisolving. That’s why, from the beginning of our work we have collaborated with others to understand the bright spots of multisolving around the world and to pilot multisolving approaches. First in Milwaukee in partnership with the Milwuakee Metropolitan Sewerage District and then in Atlanta, with Partnership for Southern Equity, we began to see what was possible by bringing the different parts of a system together in pursuit of actions and investments that lifted up many goals at once.
From this action research, along with a series of case studies of multisolving projects, we began to see attitudes and approaches that are in common across a wide diversity of multisolving projects, a topic we wrote about in Stanford Social Innovation Review.
Then came 2020. Pandemic. Escalating climate change impacts. Dire warnings about biodiversity loss. And more and more folks connecting the dots between each of these issues and structural inequity. Invitations to write, speak, and teach about multisolving came fast and furious and with it the possibility that what we’ve learned from multisolving bright spots could help support leaders around the world to respond to crises with multisolving. That spark led to the launch of the Multisolving Institute and our mission of supporting leaders as they pursue multisolving approaches
