From Professional Sports to Campus Communities

Alyah Kanso

Sustainability in Action: From Professional Sports to Campus Communities

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After reading and listening to the interview, please refer to the bottom for self-reflection questions to assist with your next steps!

Alyah Kanso, Sustainability Strategist, Keynote Address for the Regeneration Symposium

What does sustainability actually look like inside a major sports organization? In this keynote, Alyah Kanso will share how they built and led sustainability strategy within the Golden State Warriors basketball team, driving measurable impact across waste reduction, fresh water reduction, food recovery, carbon accounting, transportation and more. As the NBA's inaugural full-time sustainability professional, Alyah helped embed environmental responsibility into arena operations, community engagement, and regional climate efforts. Drawing from real-world experience at the intersection of athletics, business, and environmental justice, Alyah will explore how sports institutions, from professional teams to college programs, can use their platforms, purchasing power, and influence to advance climate responsibility at scale. This session invites student-athletes and campus leaders to see themselves not just as spectators but as change agents capable of shaping more equitable, resilient futures.

Zoom Interview and Transcript

SELF-REFLECTION: INVITATION FOR EDUCATORS

Invitation to Reflect on Practice, Pedagogy, & Community Action

This guide invites educators from passive consumption of this interview to active reflection. Alyah Kanso’s path—from pre-med student to the NBA’s first Sustainability Manager—shows that meaningful change is rarely linear, never purely individual, and always built through relationships, experimentation, and persistence. These prompts are designed to help you connect the interview’s insights to your own classroom, campus, and broader community. 

1) Leading Change from Within 

• Think of a time you tried to introduce something new in your school, department, or institution? Did curiosity, resistance, confusion, or silence happen first?  
• Kanso’s “listening tour” suggests that before proposing solutions, we should spend time learning the culture, language, and priorities of the people already doing the work. What would change in your practice if listening were treated as a required first step rather than a soft skill? 
• Kanso also emphasizes the importance of creating “small wins” while building long-term strategy. Where do you see that balance in your own teaching or programmatic work? Are there opportunities to pair a visionary goal with a visible, immediate action so that others can see momentum and participate in it? 
• Consider a unit, meeting, or assignment that asks students or colleagues to make the case for a new idea inside a resistant system. What kinds of evidence, allies, and language would they need to persuade people who are not already convinced? How might this help students understand that innovation often requires both negotiation and imagination? 

2) Community as Strategy

“We are not going to bamboo toothbrush our way out of the climate crisis. We are going to mutually aid, support each other and fix the food crisis by working together.”

• Kanso rejects the idea that sustainability can be solely reduced to individual consumer choices. How does that statement challenge the way sustainability, responsibility, or civic action is framed in your curriculum or institutions? 
• Who in your surrounding community already holds expertise that could deepen or reshape your teaching? Kanso repeatedly shows that businesses are not the experts on community needs; communities are. What would it look like to treat local organizations, mutual aid networks, food justice groups, environmental groups, or neighborhood leaders as co-educators rather than outside partners?
• Kanso used their Warriors email address strategically—as a door-opener with community organizations—while centering those organizations’ knowledge and leadership. What institutional “currency” do you carry as an educator, and how intentionally are you using it to amplify community voices? How might you use that access to open doors for community partners without taking over their work? 
• What would it look like to co-design a course module with a local environmental justice organization, food access group, or mutual aid network?
• Kanso found the Friends of the Urban Forest by walking around the city with open eyes. What do you notice when you walk the neighborhood around your campus or school?

3) Identity, Values, and Working Inside Imperfect Systems

“I didn't want to feel like I was being censored anymore, in the work that I had poured my heart and my soul, every part of me into. This work is personal, full stop.”

Kanso left the Warriors, in part, because the organization’s corporate partnerships conflicted with their values. They describe the ongoing negotiation of working inside systems that do not fully share your commitments. Their story invites us to think honestly about compromise, constraint, and the emotional labor of trying to advocate for change within systems that may resist it.

• Where do you feel the tension between your personal values and the institution you work within? Is there a practice or structural feature of your institution that you find it difficult to reconcile with what you teach?
• What would it look like to build a practice of ethical reflection into your daily or weekly routine?
• How can you stay connected to your purpose without letting institutional pressures define the limits of your work?
• What would it mean to model integrity for students by being honest about the limits of institutional work?

4) Creatively Imagining Change: Metaphors for Organizational Culture

• The “Obstacle” Metaphor
  • Throughout the interview, Kanso describes repeatedly encountering obstacles—budget limitations, institutional inertia, competing priorities, and skepticism. If your institution’s resistance to change took a physical form, what would it be? A wall? A maze? A revolving door? A mountain? Why? What would it take to move through, around, or beyond it?
• The “Ecosystem” Metaphor: Regeneration and Sustainability
  • If your institution were an ecosystem, what kind would it be? A forest? A wetland? A desert? A garden? What thrives there? What struggles to survive? What conditions would need to change for new ideas to take root?
• The “Story” Question
  • Every institution tells a story about itself. What story does your institution tell about innovation, community, or change? Where does your own experience support that story, and where does it challenge it?

Closing Thought

Sports writer Eduardo Galeano observed that sports can teach us something important about community. A fan rarely says, "My team is playing." Instead, they say, "We're playing." The team becomes part of a larger "we."

That shift from "I" to "we" matters beyond sports. Climate change can't be solved by individual actions alone. While personal choices are important, lasting change happens when people work together toward a shared goal.

Think about your organization. How could it learn from the spirit of a sports team and its fans? How might people move beyond focusing on "my job," "my project," or "my contribution" and instead see themselves as part of a larger effort? What would help transform "I" and "me" into "we" as you work together to create a more sustainable future?