Episode 309 - Justin Bibb Thumbnail

Prioritizing resilience to extreme weather and climate change is creating new clean energy jobs

A conversation with Justin Bibb, mayor of Cleveland, chair of Climate Mayors
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In this episode of Work in Progress, Mayor Justin Bibb of Cleveland talks about how a coalition of American mayors are attacking the impact of extreme weather and environmental challenges in their communities and are bolstering their local economies by creating clean energy jobs.

I recently traveled to Miami Beach for the Aspen Ideas: Climate conference, a gathering of global, federal, and local policymakers, corporate leaders, and scientists, brought together by the Aspen Institute to discuss solutions to the impacts of climate change and pollution. 

There I met members of Climate Mayors, a coalition of 750 mayors from 48 states representing more than 60 million Americans. 

Climate Mayors lays out its mission as:

  • Supporting sustainable infrastructure projects that bolster resilience to extreme weather and climate change, and modernize the electric grid,
  • Advancing environmental justice, and
  • Creating an abundance of clean energy jobs in their communities.

Mayor Justin Bibb of Cleveland – the chair of the group – sat down with me at the conference to discuss those goals and how the mayors are working to achieve results for the people they serve.

He highlights the need for public-private partnerships and collaboration to drive sustainable economic growth and bring jobs to his cities and others around the country. Mayor Bibb says the bipartisan federal legislation that’s making funding available for rebuilding infrastructure and creating jobs is key to those partnerships.

“We’re at the front lines of making sure we take this historic federal investment and have real solutions, real models of best practices in cities, from Madison to Cleveland to LA to New York City. Part of our work is ensuring that cities have the capacity and technical assistance they need to navigate the labyrinth of federal guidelines and regulations to navigate this funding.”

Mayor Bibb stresses the importance of making the benefits of the greening of the economy accessible to all residents, particularly those in marginalized communities.

He also shares his vision for Cleveland as a resilient, equitable, and prosperous city that can serve as a model for the rest of the country.

“We want to create high-paying, good-quality jobs, particularly in the building trades, for a lot of the work we need to do to address the built environment. We’re also really focused on leveraging our roots in advanced manufacturing, and this new growing movement of sustainable manufacturing. The new reshoring trend that we’re seeing coming out of the pandemic is going to bode well for the nation and bode really well for Cleveland and Northeast Ohio.”

I asked him he wants the country to describe Cleveland in the near future.

“Hope, promise, resilience, opportunity. We’ve been a city that has been tough on ourselves for a long time. We know how to rebound in a way that I think is an embodiment of the Great American can-do spirit. And in many ways, Cleveland is America, and America is Cleveland from the legacy issues we’ve had around race, and disinvestment, and segregation and how globalization impacted our city’s economy. And if we can see an equitable, prosperous, inclusive comeback in Cleveland, and I think it shows the nation that if it can be done in Cleveland, it can be done anywhere.”

You can listen to the podcast here, or download and listen wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find it our Work in Progress YouTube channel.

This podcast was created in collaboration with the Aspen Institute.

Episode 309: Justin Bibb, Cleveland mayor and Climate Mayors chair
Host & Executive Producer: Ramona Schindelheim, Editor-in-Chief, WorkingNation
Producer: Larry Buhl
Theme Music: Composed by Lee Rosevere and licensed under CC by 4
Transcript: Download the transcript for this episode here
Work in Progress Podcast: Catch up on previous episodes here

Dana Beth Ardi

Executive Committee

Dana Beth Ardi, PhD, Executive Committee, is a thought leader and expert in the fields of executive search, talent management, organizational design, assessment, leadership and coaching. As an innovator in the human capital movement, Ardi creates enhanced value in companies by matching the most sought after talent with the best opportunities. Ardi coaches boards and investors on the art and science of building high caliber management teams. She provides them with the necessary skills to seek out and attract top-level management, to design the ideal organizational architectures and to deploy people against strategy. Ardi unearths the way a business works and the most effective way for people to work in them.

Ardi is an experienced business executive and senior consultant who leverages business organizational transformation through talent strategies. She uses her knowledge and experience to develop talent strategies to enhance revenue and profit contributions. She has a deep expertise in change management and organizational effectiveness and has designed and built high performance cultures. Ardi has significant experience in mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, IPO’s and turnarounds.

Ardi is an expert on the multi-generational workforce. She understands the four intersecting generations of workers coming together in contemporary companies, each with their own mindsets, leadership and communications styles, values and motivations. Ardi is sought after to assist companies manage and thrive by bringing the generations together. Her book, Fall of the Alphas: How Beta Leaders Win Through Connection, Collaboration and Influence, will be published by St. Martin’s Press. The book reflects Ardi’s deep expertise in understanding organizations and our changing society. It focuses on building a winning culture, how companies must grow and evolve, and how talent influences and shapes communities of work. This is what she has coined “Corporate Anthropology.” It is a playbook on how modern companies must meet challenges – culturally, globally, digitally, across genders and generations.

Ardi is currently the Managing Director and Founder of Corporate Anthropology Advisors, LLC, a consulting company that provides human capital advisory and innovative solutions to companies building value through people. Corporate Anthropology works with organizations, their cultures, the way they grow and develop, and the people who are responsible for forming their communities of work.

Prior to her position at Corporate Anthropology Advisors, Ardi served as a Partner/Managing Director at the private equity firms CCMP Capital and JPMorgan Partners. She was a partner at Flatiron Partners, a venture capital firm working with early state companies where she pioneered the human capital role within an investment portfolio.

Ardi holds a BS from the State University of New York at Buffalo as well as a Masters degree and PhD from Boston College. She started her career as professor at the Graduate Center at Fordham University in New York.