Advisory Board Member
Nathaniel Smith is the founder and Chief Equity Officer of the Atlanta, Georgia-based Partnership for Southern Equity. A child of Southern Freedom Movement Activists, Smith works to advance racial equity through an equity agenda, which advances just outcomes that are sensitive to the needs and circumstances of communities – erasing the barriers that stand in the way of success to create the conditions that enable just and fair inclusion into a society in which all people can participate, prosper and reach their full potential.
Under Smith’s leadership, PSE created the South’s first equity-mapping tool, the Metro Atlanta Equity, Atlas (now the Metro Atlanta Racial Equity Atlas), and led a coalition of diverse stakeholders to support a $13 million transit referendum that expanded MARTA into a new county for the first time in 45 years. PSE continues to support the racial equity ecosystem through the COVID-19 pandemic through its COVID-19 Rapid Relief Fund, which distributed more than $500,000 to more than 30 organizations because of the initial investment of the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta and the United Way of Greater Atlanta.
Smith’s leadership was instrumental in partnering with several organizations to create the Justice40 Accelerator, designed to provide organizations with innovative front-line community climate projects the assistance to better position them to pursue and win federal funding, and to hold accountable the Biden-Harris Administration’s executive order to direct 40% of federal climate action funds to disadvantaged communities.
Also under Smith’s leadership, PSE launched in 2024 Just Communities, a bold initiative to address the opportunities and challenges of building bridges between the racial equity and sustainability fields, and to shape the next generation of urban and community development through the lens of a Black-led and racial equity-focused organization.
Smith’s accomplishments include numerous awards and distinctions, including being named to the Grist 50 by Grist Magazine in 2018, the Atlanta 500 by Atlanta Magazine (2019-2021), the GEORGIA 500 by Georgia Trend Magazine (2022-2023), and designated one of the 100 “Most Influential Georgians” by Georgia Trend. His recent accomplishments include being named an inaugural recipient of Bank of America’s Neighborhood Builders: Racial Equality award, and being named co-chair of the Drawdown Georgia Leadership Council, which addresses climate change in Georgia through the intersection of climate and equity.
He was also honored by the Georgia House of Representatives with a special proclamation recognizing his tireless efforts toward advancing racial equity. Smith’s interviews have appeared in a variety of media outlets, including Newsweek, Nonprofit Quarterly, Education Week, CNBC Digital, and others.
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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
