Lucy Bird
2019 CAT Graduate
Before studying at CAT, Lucy had trained as a professional dancer and actress and volunteered on conservation reserves and community projects in South Africa and Malawi. After graduating with an MSc in Sustainability and Adaptation in 2019 she now works as a Freelance Sustainability Consultant.
Lucy’s background before studying at CAT was unique, after training as a professional dancer and actress, she volunteered on conservation reserves and community projects in South Africa and Malawi, before turning to performing and teaching before discovering CAT.
Realising that the environmental crisis is the crisis of our time, and the feeling that she needed to do something about it, CAT saw her masters at CAT as the perfect stepping stone, to get educated on environmental problems and find out what could be done to solve them.
In 2019 she graduated from our MSc in Sustainability and Adaptation course and now works as a freelance sustainability consultant. One of her current projects is creating a new sustainability strategy for the Youth Hostel Association and she is also working with Change Agents UK to develop proposals for projects which will assist societal transformation alongside assisting in the development of Impact Festival (a London festival exploring socio-environmental issues through the arts) where her knowledge of interconnectedness, values, and practical strategies to improve the environment has informed its direction.
She is also hoping to turn her dissertation which discussed “How working with nature develops sense of interconnectedness, compassion, co-operation and responsibility” into a journal paper and is working on a PhD proposal to further her research into how relationships with nature can create inner transformation.
“The course was greatly informative and covered such a breadth of topics that I really felt like I got to dig into the deeper causes of socio-environmental issues, and understand how the whole societal system linked up. I was grateful for each module that we covered – from the practical (e.g. building, farming) to the conceptual (e.g. economics, behaviour change).
The quality of the lecturers and guests was excellent. I feel I have a good grounding in the foundational issues and some awareness of practical strategies to change things for the better. I learnt how to do research, which has been pivotal for enabling me to progress the field of inner transitions and nature connection. It’s also deepened my understanding of life itself: how systems work, how nature works, how society works…”
