Three, Sixty: With Tracy Keogh
This is an extract from Issue 6 of SDG Alpha, my newsletter that casts an Irish lens on the world of Impact Investment, Innovation, and Sustainability. In each issue, I pose three questions on the theme of sustainability to an impact entrepreneur or innovator, to get a better understanding in sixty seconds of how they’re working to achieve the SDG targets. This issue, we’re thrilled to feature Tracy Keogh, co-founder at Grow Remote.
On a personal level, what impacts of the climate crisis are you most concerned about?
Climate migration. Our grandparents had to emigrate in large part due to lack of access to jobs an opportunity, and as we solve for that in Grow Remote, climate migration is now becoming a reason for people being forced to leave their home countries.
Which of the UN SDGs did you start Grow Remote to address?
We started Grow Remote to build sustainable communities, and for that, we needed sustainable streams of employment. It was very much a ground up momentum, addressing an every day problem a bunch of community developers had. The SDGs weren’t formally a part of us setting up, perhaps at the time they seemed to academic for what we needed. Today, we fit in under quite a few, the most relevant being decent work [SDG 8]. There’s a line that in rural Ireland you can be ‘self employed, unemployed or under-employed’ and we address the last piece.
How does your business model enable the transition to a low carbon, or more sustainable future?
As a sector, this is an under developed research area. We know that remote work can lead people to travel less, but remote teams do meet in person most at least twice per year. Also, people at home consume more energy and inefficient homes means it’s not so straight forward. We’re optimistic though, as some initial research says that remote work can save over 3 million tonnes of carbon a year.
As an organisation we transition both companies and communities to remote. That means enabling companies to adopt location agnostic models that work for profit, while ensuring that the communities who need these jobs the most have access to both the jobs and the skills. Remote work is transformational especially for those communities who fall in between the cracks of FDI and startups. Once you plug employment into a community, you empower people to make their own change. And today, any ordinary person can create employment locally, simply by building awareness of the 55,000 remote jobs open in their town today.
