Immersion Alumni

Lyrica Hammann: From Foresight to Facebook

Foresight Immersion, January 2004

Before entering her last semester at Oberlin College, Lyrica spent her January term trudging across the snowy terrain of the windy city with and fellow Foresight Immersion students (called "Urban Sustainable Design" back then). She left the experience with fond memories of the ins and outs of Chicago's sustainability scene that she had never known before. From rooftop gardens to sustainably-run paper mills, this program opened Lyrica's eyes to the critical ways design can impact the way we do business and interact with the environment. The principles she learned at Foresight helped pave the way for her sustainability-related career. Upon graduating from college, she worked as a Project Manager at Chicago's Greenmaker Supply Company (now Green Depot) before moving to California a few years later and assuming a position with the Goldman Environmental Prize, a philanthropic organization that recognizes environmental heroes.

Realizing her career could benefit from more education in business and economics, she is currently completing her MBA in Sustainable Management from Presidio Graduate School. She is also employed as a Sustainability Project Manager with Facebook where she manages interns, and works across several different departments identifying ways to make different components of the enterprise run more sustainably. She's currently focused on redesigning an 8-building complex on a nearby campus to improve their efficiency and reduce their impact.

Reflecting on her experience at Foresight, she notes how the experience helped push her out into the real world and challenged her to apply sustainability principles to real-world business situations. One lesson she took away was to never assume anything has to be the way it is. She believes that the choices in front of us today are merely manifested results of largely arbitrary past designs that have, for better and for worse, framed the way we live.

Lyrica wants to challenge young professionals heading into this field to always take a step back when facing these overwhelming design flaws and to think big and creatively—identifying the core of the problem can be just as difficult as formulating solutions. She related this idea to a book she is currently reading—The Big Short—which is an in-depth analysis of the recent mortgage financial crisis. "Never assume things are going the way they should be," she says.

As a girl who grew up in New England, Lryica feels a deep connection with nature and enjoys hiking and spending quality time outdoors. She is car-less by choice in San Francisco, and enjoys traveling on the shuttle that Facebook offers to commute to and from work.