Sustainability Associate - Groundswell

At the start of this year, we spun the Impact and Sustainability team out of the Octopus Group, to create a new business called Groundswell.

Octopus is known for entering broken industries and coming up with solutions. We recognise that over the last five years, the role of sustainability has changed. While we’ve been working within Octopus to make sustainability an integrated part of the business, the wider industry has become more siloed and more focused on reporting.

We’re rethinking sustainability – we’re calling it the Third Wave:

1. In the first wave, sustainability was seen as being separate from business. A few companies embedded sustainability within their business, but they did so because they understood its value.
2. In the second, regulators, consumers, and investors, forced it onto the agenda. This created a whole new industry, but in the process, sustainability became siloed from the wider business.
3. We’re now approaching the third wave. Where most companies realise that sustainability is simply part of doing good business, moving it from a siloed function to a firm-wide capability.

We’re helping asset managers, and their portfolio companies, to make sustainability integrated, commercial, and valuable, through our outsourced solution. We’ve hit the ground running, and we’re set on becoming the go to financial services sustainability agency.

We continue to support the Octopus Group and have already onboarded market leading private equity firms looking for an alternative to hiring additional resource within their internal teams.

With continued interest for our services, we are looking for:

• Individuals with financial services experience, who are looking to make the move into sustainability.
• People that understand how sustainability can add value, because we recognise that to create the change, we want to see in the world we have to operate within the system that we are a part of.  
• Someone energised by the fast-paced nature of a start-up, thrive in an innovative environment, and embrace change as an opportunity—not a challenge.

If you’re interested in working at Groundswell, please apply with a cover letter explaining your perspective on the future of sustainability in finance.

Closing date for applications: Friday 11th July - 17:00