Raiven Greenberg

What made you want to come to Lewis & Clark?

I wanted to move out of state for college to gain more independence and experience a new environment. When I visited Portland and Lewis & Clark during the admitted students’ weekend, I fell in love! Not only was the campus beautiful, but the faculty and students were an unusual combination of intelligent and down to earth, and the whole environment felt very welcoming and comfortable. I also liked that I would get the chance to be so close to nature (L&C is surrounded by forests, and the mountains and coast are both close too!), as well as in the mix of a vibrant, evolving city.

What have you been doing since graduation?

Where do I start? It has been just over six years since I’ve graduated, and it has been a very full few years! Work-wise, I have spent that time in a variety of jobs across the environmental realm.

Soon after graduating, I worked for a bit in air quality modeling with an L&C alum’s company, ZMAssociates, looking at projected air quality issues from proposed construction projects. I then moved back to Southern California and started working in wetlands restoration and conservation with a small ecological consulting firm, Tidal Influence. There, I did field work with state and federal endangered species, ran community education programming, and managed a group of undergraduate interns. I quickly moved up within the organization and took on a role in writing grant proposals for our partner organizations, and managing project teams when the grant funds were awarded.

I left that job after a couple of years to road trip across the U.S. with my partner, Eric Slack BA ’17, for a few months, seeing 34 states in the process! Once we returned, we both got jobs at the University of California, Irvine, where I managed the Center for Ecosystem Climate Solutions, which is a partnership between several universities in California to create geospatial datasets and web tools to help federal, state, and local agencies better manage California’s natural lands for climate adaptation and resilience. I managed a team of 50 professors, researchers, and graduate students, conducted meetings with our cross-sector partners, created and ran an internship program for 14 students, and provided strategic recommendations for the center’s products and partnerships. I also spent five years volunteering as a pro-bono consultant with Seed Consulting Group outside of work, assisting dozens of environmental nonprofits. I was on the groups’ leadership team for three years, and was president of the Orange County Chapter for the last year and a half before starting business school.

Eric and I moved to Durham, North Carolina, for me to start my MBA at Duke University’s The Fuqua School of Business in summer 2022. I started my coursework with a focus on Energy and Environment and Social Entrepreneurship, and have had the opportunity to engage in interesting opportunities, such as joining the board of a local nonprofit, B Academics, consulting for the World Wildlife Foundation on a climate finance project, and becoming the copresident of my school’s Net Impact Club.

This summer, I am an EDF Climate Corps Fellow, working with the Environmental Defense Fund to provide strategic recommendations on how to better integrate environmental and climate justice into their new Net Zero Action Accelerator, providing businesses resources and advice on how to reach net zero emissions in a just and equitable way.

How did Lewis & Clark prepare you for grad school and your internship?

The interdisciplinary nature of Lewis & Clark allowed me to take classes in a variety of topics that influenced my thinking in terms of how I could bring various fields of thought together to create positive change for issues that were important to me. Taking classes across psychology, entrepreneurship, climate science, environmental studies, and more eventually led me to develop my theory of change of using business and cross-sector partnerships as a lever to make a large positive impact for people and the planet.

What would you say is the most important thing you learned at Lewis & Clark?

I learned so much tangible information across a variety of topics that I took classes in, but even more importantly, Lewis & Clark taught me how to both think critically and communicate well with others.

How do you stay connected to Lewis & Clark as an alum?

When I was in Southern California, I joined the inaugural leadership team for the Southern California Alumni Chapter, and helped plan and host several virtual and in-person events for local L&C alumni before I moved out to Durham. I have also participated in a couple alumni panels for the environmental studies program, and have connected with students who were looking for advising in navigating environmental career paths. I still stay in touch with a few of my favorite professors via email, and also try to drop in to say hi when I’m in town.

Have you been to Alumni Weekend or other programming, like Homecoming, etc.? What did you enjoy about the event(s)?

I haven’t been back for any official alumni events, but hope to be able to join a few if I move back out to the West Coast after I graduate from my MBA program next year. I have a few L&C classmates who have attended these events in the past and said it was great to reconnect with people and also see the positive changes happening on campus!

How do you describe the liberal arts?

I see a liberal arts education as one that helps people to develop holistically as an independent and creative thinker, better team member, and proactive communicator. The breadth of knowledge gained from the liberal arts experience allows people to draw really interesting connections between sometimes seemingly disparate topics, and can lead to better, more creative solutions to some of the world’s most pressing problems. People can always expand their technical knowledge, but liberal arts education is unique in that it teaches you how to problem solve, how to ask difficult questions, and how to work collaboratively to test out new hypotheses and implement solutions across fields.

What was your favorite class? How did it expand your knowledge?

There were quite a few classes that I enjoyed at Lewis & Clark, with some of my favorites being Cross-Cultural Psychology, Methods of Entrepreneurship, and Situating Environmental Problems and Solutions. Cross-Cultural Psychology was a fascinating look at the similarities and differences in how people perceive and interact with the world across cultures, and was a lot of fun too! Methods of Entrepreneurship was a really great survey course covering many different facets of business, and I appreciated the case study method of teaching, where you examine the story about a specific company to drive home the more academic or technical concepts discussed in class. This is also how many of my business school courses are taught now. And lastly, Situating Environmental Problems and Solutions introduced me to systems thinking and stakeholder theories, which expanded my thinking about who impacts and is impacted by our natural and built environments, and whose knowledge and opinions are and are not considered in important decisions. This helped frame a lot of my work in my career thus far, and I’m sure will continue to play a large part in my work going forward.

If you studied overseas while at Lewis & Clark, how did you choose your program? What did your overseas study add to your L&C experience?

The Ireland study abroad program was appealing to me for several reasons. First, I could get course credit toward my psychology major while having the unique opportunity of having a part-time psychology-adjacent internship in Dublin. For me, that ended up being an internship with the Five Lamps Arts Festival, where I did a program evaluation of the festival (a concept aligned with the Psychology Methods course), and also got to attend some really cool local events! Second, I have always wanted to explore Ireland, both because I have some family heritage connected to the island from several generations back, and because every beautiful photo I’d seen of Ireland filled me with awe. And third, I saw that we’d have the opportunity to go on study trips around the island as part of one of our courses there, experiencing several unique geographies and cultures rather than being more confined to one city. Ireland exceeded my expectations. Dublin was a lively and comforting city, and my internship allowed me to connect more deeply with Dubliners and the culture there. My classes in Irish literature and theatre, Irish history, and Irish social welfare systems all added to my understanding of this beautiful place, and really made it a very grounded experience. I had never been to Europe, and on some weekends and on breaks I travelled more around Ireland, the U.K., and even to mainland Europe too. I might never have had this opportunity had it not been for Lewis & Clark. Studying abroad instilled in me a love for travel and new experiences, and is a time that I will always look back on fondly.

Psychology Environmental Studies