2026 Summit Workshops
You asked for more opportunities to learn and take a deeper dive into key topics, and we listened. This year, we’re bringing back optional pre-summit workshops to kick off your Summit experience. Running from 9:00 - 11:00, these sessions offer a focused look at sustainability and leadership before the main program begins. Choose from two workshop options and take your Summit experience even further. Tickets are $40 for members and $50 for non-members.
Have you already registered for the Summit and decide to add a workshop ticket later? Simply login to the account on the SBR member portal that you used to purchase your ticket. Navigate to the 2026 Sustainable Business Summit registration page. When you click on Register, an option will pop up to modify an existing registration.
Don't have an account? Reach out to bea@wnysustainablebusiness.org to add a workshop ticket to your existing registration.
Amplify Your Impact: Clarify your vision. Elevate leadership. Champion your mission.
Sustainability professionals bring deep commitment and passion to their work, yet often face burnout when trying to create change in systems resistant to it. This interactive workshop explores how professional coaching and personal branding can help sustainability leaders clarify their vision, strengthen their leadership capacity, find their authentic voice, and communicate their work in ways that inspire action.
Participants will explore a three-part framework: Align, Amplify, Lead. First, guided by Edgewater Coaching & Consulting Founder and Sustainability Leadership Coach Dr. Sarah Elaine Lewis, participants will crystallize their vision and examine how aligning their work with their values, strengths, and leadership purpose creates greater clarity and confidence. Next, with Climate Social Founder Marissa Rosen, they will explore how LinkedIn branding, strategic storytelling, and networking can amplify sustainability messages and expand reach beyond traditional audiences. Finally, participants will consider how authentic leadership and effective communication can help build partnerships, engage communities, and move complex environmental challenges toward meaningful action.
The workshop will combine reflection, practical tools, discussion, and real-world examples to help participants identify opportunities to strengthen both their leadership presence and their communications strategy. Participants will leave with greater clarity about their vision for change, concrete ideas for amplifying their sustainability work, and tangible next steps that feel doable and energizing.
Facilitator Bios
Dr. Sarah Elaine Lewis is Founder and CEO of Edgewater Coaching & Consulting, helping sustainability professionals and organizations navigate complexity, build alignment, and turn ideas into action with measurable results that have a positive impact.
A Sustainability Leadership Coach and Consultant, Sarah combines expertise in leadership, sustainability, systems thinking, stakeholder engagement, and organizational strategy to help clients move from stuck to start and create positive impact.
Sarah holds a PhD in Environmental Dynamics, is a certified Coach and Sustainability Professional, serves as Adjunct Faculty in Environmental Resiliency at the University of Arkansas, and is the former Director of Innovation at The Sustainability Consortium. Her leadership and community work have earned numerous awards, including Sierra Club Activist of the Year and Teacher of the Year, and she previously served on the Fayetteville, Arkansas City Council.
Her goal is simple: help good people and organizations tackle complex challenges, find a way forward, and get results that create positive impact.
Marissa Rosen is Founder and Principal Consultant of Climate Social, a strategic communications micro-agency helping organizations and thought leaders tell their sustainability stories and create impact.
Marissa combines expertise in public relations, social media, branding, and content creation to help clients inspire action. Climate Social serves leading startups, SMBs, academic initiatives, and global nonprofits, including South Pole, LanzaTech, and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development.
She holds a B.A. from the University of Missouri and a Masters in Environmental Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. She previously led sustainability communications at TriplePundit and Sustainable Brands, led stakeholder marketing for the U.S. DOE's Energy Efficient Buildings Hub, and consulted startups at the Wharton Small Business Development Center. A sought-after speaker and podcast guest, she serves on the boards of the League of Minority Voters, Communitopia, and the Global Water Alliance, and was named a 2026 RealLIST Pittsburgh Connector by Technical.ly.
Marissa advocates that the right story, told the right way, can change minds, move communities, and shift markets.
Beyond Your Four Walls: Building Enterprise Value Through Sustainable Value Chain Thinking
Businesses often approach sustainability by looking at it as an additional reporting layer: What should we measure? What initiatives should we implement? What are our investors asking for?
But many of the greatest risks and opportunities for value creation exist in alignment to core business objectives as well as beyond the organization’s four walls.
Suppliers face their own pressures around cost, productivity, resources, and resilience. Customers have evolving expectations around price, quality, reliability, and transparency. Employees, communities, investors, and other stakeholders bring additional objectives. At the same time, an expanding ecosystem of technologies, data, financing mechanisms, partnerships, and operational solutions is available to address these challenges.
The opportunity is not simply to find more solutions. It is to align the right solutions with the right business needs across the value chain.
This interactive session will introduce a practical framework for doing exactly that. Participants will learn how to map sustainability into their own core business objectives, as well as to their upstream and downstream value chains by identifying the objectives and constraints of critical stakeholders, and uncover where those needs intersect with their own business priorities.
From there, they will explore how sustainability solutions can be intentionally aligned to create shared value, strengthening supply continuity, reducing costs and risk, improving productivity, responding to customer needs, and creating new opportunities for growth.
Rather than beginning with the question, “What should our sustainability strategy be?” participants will learn to ask: What are we trying to accomplish? What do the stakeholders around us need to succeed? How do we build resilience? And what solutions can help us achieve both?
Participants will apply the framework to a real business challenge through an interactive value-chain mapping exercise. They will leave with a practical way to look beyond their own operations, identify hidden dependencies and opportunities, and use sustainability as a strategic tool for building stronger enterprise value and greater resilience across the entire value chain.
Facilitator Bio
Shila Wattamwar is a sustainability and enterprise strategy leader with nearly two decades of experience helping
organizations translate sustainability, risk, data, and stakeholder needs into business value. Her career includes executive
leadership at Sustainalytics, where she helped scale the business through its acquisition by Morningstar, subsequent work
integrating sustainability across Morningstar, and leadership roles spanning climate resilience, corporate sustainability, and
strategic growth. She has also contributed to two successful company exits, including an acquisition and an IPO. Shila is the
founder of Generational Food Systems; a platform focused on aligning stakeholder objectives and solutions across complex
value chains. Her broader work examines how businesses can move beyond isolated sustainability initiatives to build
stronger, more resilient enterprises by understanding interdependencies, aligning incentives, and connecting the right
solutions to the business outcomes that matter.