Bringing the Edges of Earth to Corporate Decision-makers - Andi Cross
co-founder Edges of Earth
Andy Cross uses her extensive experience as an explorer and as a trade strategist and venture capitalist to design solutions for corporate groups. Her company Edges if Earth works with individuals and communities to advance nature-based solutions and to bring these perspectives to corporate decision-makers. Andi offers actionable strategies to achieve tangible changes for organizations on the front line of the climate crisis.
Video conversation with Andi … click here
What Andi talks about …
Andi first learned about the ocean through books and going to aquariums. Her initial work was as a corporate strategist working her way up the corporate ladder but by2017 she became focused on the climate crisis. Her solution was to move to Australia and learn to scuba dive. She met amazing people who had grown up by the sea and she learned Australian ways of seeing the ocean. She created an ecosystem of media partners and a network where she could publish stories about amazing frontline heroes. And through her relationships and connections and found herself traveling the world documenting positive progress in the face of the climate crisis.
Show Notes
00:00:07 Pam Ferris-Olson Today on the Wo(men) Mind the Water Artivist Series podcast on WomenMindTheWater.com, I'm speaking with Andi Cross of Edges of Earth. Her company works with individuals and communities to advance nature-based solutions and to bring these perspectives to corporate decision-makers. Andi offers actionable strategies to achieve tangible changes for organizations on the front line of the climate crisis.
00:00:38 Pam Ferris-Olson Wo(men) Mind the Water Artivist Series podcast on womenmindthewater.com engages artivists in conversation about their work and explore their connection with water. Through their stories, Wo(men) Mind the Water hopes to inspire and encourage action to protect water and all the creatures that depend on it.
00:00:59 Pam Ferris-Olson I'm talking to Andy Cross of Edges of Earth. Andy uses her extensive experience as an explorer and as a trade strategist and venture capitalist to design solutions to be applied in corporate board groups.
00:01:16 Pam Ferris-Olson Welcome, Andy. I'm very grateful to you for joining us today. I believe you are the most distant guest that I have had the pleasure of talking with. I have many questions. But first, let me ask you, how did a gal born in Pennsylvania winds up in living in Perth, Australia, some 10,000 miles away?
00:01:40 Andi Cross Thank you so much for having me. It's really great to be here. I very much appreciate it. And that's a great question. I guess it all had to start with my love of the ocean from a very young age, except I wasn't one of those people who had access to it. So for me, my exposure to the ocean was always through books and aquariums. And I spent my whole childhood wondering if there would ever be a chance that I'd lived near the ocean or about to build a career around the ocean.
00:02:14 Andi Cross But life takes its toll. So I ended up becoming a corporate strategist, moving to New York, working up the corporate ladder. And by 2017, I couldn't unsee the climate crisis that was unfolding all over our news feeds. And I had a catalytic moment where I saw the National Geographic had published a polar bear standing on a piece of ice that was melting and the polar bear was starving. And I said, “I have to use my skills for something that I deeply care about. I have to leave corporate New York. I have to stop selling expensive sneakers to people who don't need them anymore in my marketing and brand roles and apply all these skills for the things that I care about most.”
00:02:59 Andi Cross And so I bought a one-way ticket to Perth, Western Australia, which is the furthest point on Earth from where I live and grew up. And I went there to learn to become a diver and to connect my passion, profession, and purpose together. And I thought, “Why not go to an extreme to radically alter my life and see where the world takes me?
00:03:24 Pam Ferris-Olson I've got to say that is an incredibly gutsy move to take a one way ticket to go halfway around the world to learn how to dive. I mean, there are places closer in the US. So what possessed you to become a world traveler and explore the edges of the earth?
00:03:45 Andi Cross When I was working in corporate, my job was taking me all around the world, and I would go on pitch meetings to major cities in the US, and sometimes they'd go global. And through that experience, my eyes were just opening to other ways of life, how other people lived, how other people spent their time. And everywhere I went, I would ask people, “Are you happy?” Just a very simple question, and for the most part, most people said “No.” Especially in the United States.
00:04:15 Andi Cross The big cities, everyone was working. Their lives were revolving around the grind and getting ahead and being successful in their careers. But as I started making my way over to the Eastern Hemisphere, I started meeting Australians, and they were the first people, every single one, who told me that they were happy with their life. And so I got quite inspired by this and I wanted to see what Australia was all about.
00:04:41 Andi Cross And when I started touring around. I realized quite quickly that life moves a little bit slower down under and you can really connect with nature. And so that's what inspired me to move to Australia. And in that time, I started exploring all over the country. And I was meeting these amazing people who had grown up by the sea, people who've been diving their whole lives swimming their whole lives surfing. I never had those experiences, and a few of them were willing to take me under their wing and show me their Australian ways.
00:05:12 Andi Cross And through that process, I just started traveling a lot more for diving, and I fell in love with the sport. And although I was a wildly terrible beginner diver and very nervous and absolutely horrified of the ocean and its creatures with the right training and some really, really amazingly patient people I started moving up in my credentials. I started going deeper and farther and staying down longer. And just instead of seeing the megafauna and the obvious, I started seeing the littler things, the ecosystems that go overlooked and with that meeting a lot of people who were working to protect these fragile environments, and I just fell in love with the stories.
00:05:58 Andi Cross I was just meeting such amazing people all around the world through diving, and it became this gateway. And it made me want to continue. But it also identified a gap. While we love telling stories about the ocean, there's a lot of people who go unnoticed for their work in contributing to its conservation, protection, restoration. And I thought, “Maybe I could create an ecosystem of media partners and a network where I could publish stories and publish content about these amazing frontline heroes whose story just need to be told more.” And through all my relationships and connections in New York and my ability to bring stories to main stages, it actually unraveled rather quickly. And I found myself traveling the world documenting positive progress in the face of the climate crisis.
00:06:49 Pam Ferris-Olson So tell us some of the places that you’ve visited.
00:06:52 Andi Cross For sure. So we've been to 47 countries in the last three years.
We've been everywhere from traveling Oceania through to Africa, all over South America, Central America, back home in the United States. We've done quite a bit in Canada. We've done a bit of Europe, but I would say most of our travel has been in the southern hemisphere, which has been so spectacular. And when we say the edges, originally when we started our journey, it meant going to the most remote or the farthest away places. But that's changed because edges to us means so much. It means coastlines and it could be coastlines.
00:07:36 Andi Cross It could be coastlines of an urban estuary. It could be coastlines of a remote island. It could be coastlines of, you know, incredibly special forest meeting reefs. The edges mean so much to us now. So we really don't discriminate in the places that we go. We're chasing the stories of the people who really are making meaningful change when it comes to restoring and protecting our blue planet.
00:08:04 Pam Ferris-Olson Okay, now I'm beginning to see the pattern here. How did you select the places? And was it your intention always to apply these experiences to corporate boardrooms?
00:08:18 Andi Cross Yeah, so when we first started, we were chasing marine aggregations because I always thought we needed to look big: dolphins, whales, sharks, big congregations, big schools of fish, sardine runs. And I had this view that if I chased these aggregations, I would find people who were protecting them, which was amazing. And I've had such incredible encounters and I've loved my megafauna experiences. But I started to realize that some of the most powerful and potent stories of climate resilience or nature-based solutions that are actually succeeding come from the most overlooked places.
00:09:00 Andi Cross So, for example, these oysters behind me: Billion Oyster Project in New York is restoring a billion oysters to the New York Harbor by 2030. I had no idea this project was happening in my very own backyard. So when you start to look a little bit closer, maybe at a species like the native eastern oyster that can be found all up and down the east coast of the USA and was incredibly abundant in the New York Harbor, you know, from the 1600s on until colonization. You start to realize there's these incredible, incredible solutions happening all over. And so I wasn't always chasing the same thing. But with time, what happened while I started the expedition, reaching out and contacting people that I thought had incredible solutions. We started to bring on quite a few partners to the equation.
00:09:56 Andi Cross So we have about eight sponsors and partners that work with us really closely to help identify positive solutions that have the potential to scale if they get the right exposure, the right resources, the right access. And that's what started to get me thinking, “Okay, what if I connected my consulting world and strategy with these grassroots teams that I was meeting on the edges of earth while in order to provide more access, resources, and support that otherwise these grassroots teams would not have. That could be in the form of funding, that could be in the form of media exposure, that could be in the form of pro bono consulting, bringing on my team of experts to help where there's critical gaps, but that could help elevate the teams in pretty significant ways.
00:10:40 Andi Cross And so my consulting business, that I've been running for quite some time out of New York, in the strategy capacity was now funding all of my expedition work and the pro bono work that I was doing in the field with these incredible scaled solutions. So some of our partners that would help us identify strong grassroots teams. Marine Conservation Institute, which has been one of our longest term partners. They work to identify the best marine protected areas in the world. Scuba Schools International, SSI, they've been one of our long partners as well who helped identify where the most critical dive locations in the world that must have good, positive, conservation work happening in order for them to continue to be so pristine and special. We work really closely with ScubaPro, who've outfitted us. And 1% for the Planet, for example, where our pro bono work is being tracked and monitored by that organization to prove that there really is value in business connecting with environmental conservation groups.
00:11:46 Pam Ferris-Olson All right, let's focus on that because that's the piece that I don't understand. How does you're identifying people who are on the front lines working. What does a company gain from investing in it?
00:12:04 Andi Cross By partnering with us and working with us, they know that their money is going towards grassroots projects that otherwise they wouldn't have connection to. And similarly, the grassroots teams are getting funding from unlikely sources where they would never have thought to go there. So it's just creating a new stream of funding and capacity where it just didn't exist before.
00:12:27 Pam Ferris-Olson So are you finding it difficult to either encourage corporate sponsors to focus on ESG or even to locate corporate partners?
00:12:40 Andi Cross No, actually not really at all, which is quite promising. We have not had issues in any way. We haven't been blocked. We haven't had any sort of pushback. And that comes down to the networking and the relationships that have been forged over the years from corporate New York. And so while it sounds really nice that I left America and went to Australia to become a diver, I never really quit my day job through this process. And I think that's one of the most valuable pieces of advice or insights that I can give to others who are looking to figure out how to connect their world, their profession, and their purpose.
00:13:23 Andi Cross I have to say the biggest value and the biggest asset that I've been able to provide grassroots teams is giving them a connection back to the States, and giving them connections to people who really believe in the work that they're doing, and want to support them and don't require and don't necessarily have a tie to government or a policy. They're quite independent operators, independent organizations, and have the ability to put money where it matters.
00:13:51 Andi Cross So I think that relationship building that I spent so many years working on in New York has really paid off. And that piece, that bridge, which is unique, which is why you asked. I don't know how to, I don't understand this, because it's not normal. And it's not a model that currently exists in abundance. But that's what's been really exciting about this is being able to bridge those worlds and have no roadblocks really at all.
00:14:19 Pam Ferris-Olson So at the end of each podcast, I ask guests to offer advice to listeners on how they can make a difference. And clearly, you're someone who is knowledgeable about both the business world and concerned with environmental issues, sustainability. So what advice do you have for listeners on how they can make a difference?
00:14:42 Andi Cross This might be an unpopular thing for me to say as a capitalist and a conservationist. Those two worlds can exist, and I've seen it work. Understanding how business works and spending time within large organizations or agencies or enterprises and observing and absorbing, I think is so valuable. And a lot of people don't want to participate in the corporate grind. And I understand because there's definitely cons to working in that capacity.
00:15:15 Andi Cross And now with the ability to work remote and to travel more freely and all the access that we do have at our fingertips, it's easy to want to just go live in the field. Or become a diver or become a content creator. But I have to say, “The biggest piece of advice that I could give is: ‘if there's a skill that you can harness and you can learn from corporate or you can learn from an enterprise, and then you can come out the other side. And create something of your own. Or work with people who share the same vision and values as you in a startup capacity or in a way that you're really truly leveraging your skills.’”
00:15:51 Andi Cross It's so valuable to see the multi-sides of business. Whether that's the enterprise side, the startup side, the mid-market and then also finding your connection with nature and figuring out how those worlds can coexist. It's a really powerful thing and not enough people are doing it. So there's white space, there's a gap..
00:16:12 Andi Cross And I say this all the time: “I can't say that my core day job is the sexiest in the world, but it's opened up doors for me that I didn't expect. And it's been able, it's been the catalyst for what's allowed me to do all of the things that I do today.” So marketers, project managers, accountants, lawyers, it doesn't matter what skill you have. If you can really hone in and harness that and become an expert and then figure out how to apply it to your passion. Hopefully it's the ocean. Hopefully it's water. And it's a real opportunity for you today.
00:16:45 Pam Ferris-Olson So Andy I have to say I can feel your passion but more important, you know, you’ve said you moved to Australia because you found happy people. Clearly, you're a happy person. And it's amazing that you've found a way to mesh it. And I do hope that more people will figure that out because they'll live happier and hopefully our environment will be healthier.
00:17:12 Pam Ferris-Olson So I again want to thank you for being on the Wo(men) Mind the Water Artivist series. Yours is a very different perspective than we might otherwise hear, because companies are often thought of as the bad guys when it comes to the environment. So it's good to hear that companies can be earnest in wanting to contribute to a sustainable environment.
00:17:35 Pam Ferris-Olson I'd like listeners to know that I've been speaking with Andy Cross of Edges of Earth. Andy is the latest guest on the Wo(men) Mind the Water Artivist Series podcast. The series can be viewed on womenmindthewater.com and YouTube. A transcript is available on womenmindthewater.com, and an audio-only version can be heard on iTunes and Spotify.
00:17:59 Pam Ferris-Olson Wo(men) Mind the Water is grateful to Jaine Rice for their use of her song, Women of Water. All rights for the Wo(men) Mind the Water name and logo belong to Pam Faris Olson. This is Pam Ferris-Olson.