Chad Park is the Chief Innovation Officer of The Natural Step Canada and the Director of the Energy Futures Lab. He is a founding member of The Natural Step Canada team and has been with The Natural Step since 2002.
Chad regularly writes and delivers presentations on a wide range of sustainability and social innovation topics, including collaborating for systems change, sustainability-driven innovation, organizational change, and sustainability leadership. His work increasingly focuses on partnership-building and enabling collaboration, having led the development and launch of a multi-stakeholder approach to tackling complex social and environmental challenges called the Sustainability Transition Lab. Chad is the Director of one such collaborative initiative, the Energy Futures Lab, and plays a key thought leadership role with other initiatives including the Future Fit Business Benchmark, Housing Action Lab, and Natural Capital Lab.
Initially having served as a sustainability advisor for The Natural Step, he has provided training and coaching advice for dozens of businesses and communities in Canada and internationally, including The Co-operators, Nike, Rio Tinto Alcan, the Resort Municipality of Whistler, and the Alberta Urban Municipalities Association. As an expert in The Natural Step Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development, he has also served as lead author or subject matter expert on a number of The Natural Step’s core learning materials, including its series of award-winning eLearning courses and its Guide for Community Sustainability Planning. He was also the lead designer for The Natural Step’s Accelerate: Collaborating for Sustainability conferences in June 2013 and 2014.
As a testament to Chad’s leadership in the field of sustainability, he was honoured in 2012 by Delta Management as one of the inaugural recipients of the Clean 50 award – the 50 individuals in Canada who have done the most to advance the cause of sustainability and clean capitalism. Chad was recognized for his leadership and accomplishments in working with dozens of leading Canadian businesses and municipalities to help them integrate sustainability into their business strategy, operations, and organizational culture. In particular, he has been The Natural Step Canada’s lead sustainability advisor to The Co-operators, helping to propel the company to the top of the Corporate Knights Magazine’s Top 50 Corporate Citizens list in 2011. Chad was also recognized as one of the AIESEC Alumni 40 under 40, showcasing some of the 40 most promising young leaders of tomorrow under 40 years old around the world.
Prior to joining The Natural Step Canada in 2002, Chad worked on sustainability and corporate social responsibility initiatives with Mountain Equipment Co-op, Vancity Credit Union, the Canadian Eco-Industrial Network, the Sustainability Asset Management Group, and the Zero Emissions Research and Initiatives Foundation in Geneva, Switzerland. He is a past national president of AIESEC Canada, and his facilitation and envoy experiences have taken him to dozens of countries around the world.
Chad holds a Master of Science in Environmental Management and Policy from the International Institute for Industrial Environmental Economics at Lund University in Sweden, where he was a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar. He also holds a Bachelor of Commerce degree from the University of Alberta. He now resides with his family in Edmonton, Alberta.
