Flynn Bucy, Ph.D. is a well-known senior specialist in the area of Corporate Social Responsibility, Sustainable Development and Futures Studies. He has been a senior executive in both large and small businesses, the Director for the high-profile Center for Entrepreneurship at Baylor University, and worked extensively with World Vision and other major non-profits. He has worked on numerous projects providing education, research and capacity building for sustainable development in over sixteen countries. He has also spent time with EarthVoice, a leading non-profit environmental group, where he developed and implemented numerous projects involving sustainable energy and information technology promoting sustainable development. “We need a mindset change as well as a ‘heart-set’ change. Ultimately it’s what we care about, not what we’re trying to figure out.”
FB: I have known Hank for the past decade and what he is doing is what I think is exactly needs to be done, so am thrilled to be a part of this new organization. I now am a part of the Nature For Justice Advisory Network and have been working on a few aspects on this, most recently with Wain Collen of Aliados. We are trying to help leaders in these key organizations such as Wain that are locally grounded but need international support in areas such as financial, technical and policy. For several weeks we have met online once a week to discuss the parts of his organization and business.
Through this I have helped him think through some of the challenges he faces as he moves from what I call a ‘Manager to an Executive’ role. Its often very difficult for managers to become executive’s because they are often very used to engaging people to push the process, whereas an executive has to create structure that allows the organization to grow. So, my role is to help support this growth within our partner organizations to ensure their success. 
FB: There’s a challenge to how we’ve done development work where we tend to focus on short-term outcomes and there’s a very different mindset to how do we support capacity building at the local level that will eventually yield the kinds of outcomes we need. So, when funding is based on short- term target impacts as opposed to longer-term capacity building we need to be able to support these communities to embrace their own capability in order to understand and address the kind of giant climate vulnerabilities they face as well as other challenges.
So how do we help these communities make a viable living that will support the environment, though becoming environmental stewards as well as sustainable earners rather than just clearing land and bringing in the cattle as has been done for hundreds of years? Mother Nature cannot support this kind of plunder much longer, one that supports more growth and more profit which is a really closed system. So we have to figure out how to do this differently very quickly so that we can have resilient communities that also supports our natural world and climate.
LC: Thank you for your insights Flynn, it’s been a pleasure to chat to you and look forward to hearing more about your upcoming projects.
