New York Road Runners
At a Glance
Industry
Nonprofit
Project Types
Data Analysis, Sustainability and Energy Management Strategy
Year
2022
Location
New York, NY
Summary
Emily Brady compiled evidence for the Council for Responsible Sport’s Standard for Organizations and created a roadmap to help New York Road Runners reach their sustainability goals and targets.
Goals
New York Road Runners (NYRR) is a NYC based non-profit organization with a mission to “help and inspire through running”. They work to be a leader in sustainability in the sports world and recently committed to net-zero emissions by 2040. They brought on Emily Brady to work on two main projects: defining a pathway to net zero and gathering evidence for a sustainability certification.
Solutions
In order to create a roadmap Emily followed the framework from EDF+ Business & Deloitte’s Pathways to Net Zero. She reviewed sustainability initiatives and actions from the organization and mapped them to targeted emissions. The initiatives were then evaluated based on criteria identified by NYRR and that information was used to prioritize the initiatives into 5-year blocks of time. The result is a roadmap with over 70 initiatives targeting goals in the categories of emissions, waste and circularity, water, and transparency.
Emily met with employees across almost every department at NYRR to gather evidence for the sustainability certification. She compiled screenshots, documents, weblinks, images, and staff testimony into concise documentation for each indicator and created a system for tracking the location of evidence.
Potential Impact
NYRR now has an organized plan for reaching net-zero emissions and other sustainability targets, and they can easily add to and adjust it as more progress is made on initiatives. They are on track to pursue certification by the Council for Responsible Sport soon after the fellowship and have a good system in place for future certifications.