The Lessons of Luxembourg on Chicago’s South Side
Tannis Williamson (M.P.A. ’06) got the idea for her consulting firm while getting a crash course about other cultures in the Netherlands.
The Arab Spring had just happened, with protests across many countries in the Arab world. Those protests were followed by a crackdown—and an influx of immigrants arriving in Europe.
“That experience, learning about different cultures, I walked away from that experience in amazement and awe. I began to understand [diversity, equity, and inclusion] from a different perspective than race, that there’s more to it, there’s culture and nationality,” Williamson says.
Additionally, the Paris Climate Agreement had just been signed in 2015, prompting conversations about climate change across Europe and the globe.
“I saw how companies were talking about it and [nongovernmental organizations] were talking about it, and I felt—I still feel—like everyone is operating in silos even though they’re trying to accomplish the same goal. How can we create a platform for these people to come together and achieve their goals?” Williamson asked.
She’d just graduated from the University of Luxembourg as the only United States citizen in its master’s program in entrepreneurship and innovation, so she founded The Sustainability Firm in 2017 to work with NGOs and businesses in Europe.
“Fundraising and strategic thinking were key strengths for Tannis. Working with her was such a breeze,” says Tawanda Hondora, who hired Williamson while she was still in the Netherlands as the executive director of the World Federalist Movement, an NGO that at the time worked on conflict-related issues in Latin America and Africa.
The World Federalist Movement was going through a difficult restructuring at the time in an attempt to be more sustainable, and though Hondora was in the midst of cost-cutting and reluctant to spend money on outside talent, a colleague urged him to meet with her.
“For her, clearly, money was not the motivation, but rather, ‘What impact can I bring?’” Hondora says. “We benefited quite immensely, and for way less than the cost we would’ve paid had we gone out to the market.”
Despite her growing business in the Netherlands, in 2020, Williamson and her husband moved back to Chicago during the COVID-19 pandemic. She’d spent much of her adult life in Chicago, and was a little surprised by what she found when she returned after just over a decade.
“It definitely wasn’t the same place I left. I returned the day after the George Floyd riots. I came back to the South Side of Chicago, and places were boarded up. It was very, very traumatizing for me, to say the least,” Williamson says.
Before her time overseas, Williamson had worked for six years at the Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr.’s Rainbow Push Coalition after being introduced to him at the organization’s national convention in Chicago.
Her family had grown up with Jackson in Greenville, South Carolina. Her aunt, Joan Mattison Daniel, was one of the “Greenville Eight,” a group of Black high school students who, in 1960, entered the Greenville County Public Library and quietly read books and magazines before being arrested after the librarian called the police on them.
“I told my aunt, ‘I want to work there,’” Williamson says of Rainbow Push Coalition, where she worked as a constituent advocate and helped to run Jackson’s two national shows, Saturday Morning Forum and Upfront with Jesse Jackson. She also worked for the Salvation Army and another nonprofit called Y-Me National Breast Cancer before getting married and moving to Switzerland after her husband took a job there.
She restarted The Sustainability Firm in 2023, shifting her focus to small- and medium-sized businesses with a presence in the United States and Europe.
“I saw it was the smaller businesses that didn’t understand what this whole conversation around sustainability and ESG [environmental, social, and governance] was all about. They heard the buzzwords, but they don’t know what those words mean,” Williamson says.
Many investors and stakeholders use ESG criteria to screen potential investments, aiming to identify companies that are not only financially profitable, but also demonstrate what the investors see as responsible and sustainable practices. Williamson says that companies with strong ESG performance are often considered better equipped to manage risks and opportunities related to environmental and social factors.
Williamson offers her small-business clients an ESG 101 course to help them look “beyond the buzzwords.” She also offers climate risk assessments, human capital assessments utilizing DEI, and helps small businesses include sustainability in their business model.
“We want people to really understand the impact policy has on people every day,” Williamson says.