Thirty-five alumni, students, and faculty from the Bard Graduate Programs in Sustainability (GPS) have come together to launch BIG Innovations Group Cooperative, a worker-owned sustainability consulting group. The cooperative brings together interdisciplinary expertise and shared values shaped by Bard’s approach to sustainability education and practice.
Bard GPS cultivates leaders who understand that solving climate and social challenges requires more than technical proficiency. It requires an ability to navigate policy, business strategy, environmental science, and community impact all at once. The cooperative draws on this interdisciplinary foundation and applies it in practice.
BIG’s consultants are immersed in the evolving sustainability space every day: tracking policy changes, modeling new ownership structures, and developing organizational strategies informed by systems thinking. The cooperative’s work is grounded in the belief that sustainability challenges are interconnected and require solutions that are organizational, cultural, and economic in nature. The shared perspective developed through Bard GPS in business, policy, and environmental science provides a strong foundation for approaching these complex issues. BIG is where that shared perspective transforms into real-world impact and creative business opportunities.
This means they don’t simply provide advice from the outside. Clients of BIG say it feels like adding a mission-aligned extension of their team, one that helps them clarify decisions, strengthen internal capacity, and stay accountable to their values. The result is a consulting practice that is both trailblazing and deeply attuned to the complexities of building a more just and sustainable economy.
BIG operates as a worker-owned cooperative, meaning the people doing the work share ownership, decision-making power, and the value created. This business structure allows the organization to live its values internally as well as externally, and to model sustainable, democratic workplaces in real time. Worker-owned cooperatives, such as BIG, create natural accountability, because team members aren’t just completing tasks, they’re building something they own collectively. When ownership is shared, so too is the standard of excellence.
Client work to date includes:
- Go-to-market and organizational strategy
- Operational system design and implementation
- Financial modeling and training for community-owned and cooperative initiatives
- Marketing, narrative development, and stakeholder engagement
- Worker-owner transition planning and cooperative development
- Training and Capacity Building for Circular Supply Chains
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“Employee ownership should be a central pillar of local economic development,” says Michael Shuman, BIG Board Member and MBA Faculty. “I’m excited to see this team not only practicing worker ownership but helping other organizations explore it as a viable and transformative model.” |
BIG Innovations Group Cooperative is now accepting new client engagements.
- To learn more or explore a potential collaboration, visit https://biginnovationsgroup.coop/ and schedule a free introductory conversation with our team.
- You can also follow BIG on LinkedIn.
BIG Innovations Group Cooperative’s founding management team is made up of Rolena Richardson MBA '24, Jackson Thompson MBA '26, Lindsay Vick Karayannides MBA '26, Thuy-Linh Le MBA '26, and Taylor King MBA '27. The Board of Directors includes Chair Janice Shade (MBA Faculty), Michael Shuman (MBA Faculty), Unique Brathwaite (MBA Faculty), Mariana Souza MBA '18, and Max Dana MBA '26.
Interested in how graduate education can prepare people to lead real-world sustainability work?
Bard Graduate Programs in Sustainability (GPS) offers interdisciplinary, practice-based graduate programs designed for students who want to turn values into action. Bard GPS trains practitioners and cultivates leaders who work across business, policy, education, and environmental fields, developing the skills needed to navigate complexity and drive meaningful change. Students learn alongside faculty who are active scholars and practitioners, and within a collaborative community of peers bringing diverse professional and lived experience into the classroom. Grounded in systems thinking, equity, and real-world impact, Bard GPS supports students and alumni as they build careers—and organizations—focused on a more just and sustainable future.
📸 Photo by MBA candidate Emerson Sarmiento.
