An Accenture consultant switched gears, and now fights climate change with facts.

by Janet Hurley . photo by Matt Rose

Forget candy-coated almonds. If you were a guest at Jenny Dissen’s wedding in 2010, you got a tree as a favor. Not surprising, considering that the ceremony was one of the first large weddings to be held at the NC Arboretum and the bride is the director of climate literacy and outreach at the Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites in downtown Asheville. Dissen is all about climate literacy for everyone—whether it’s through executive-level training or digital gaming. Or, as it were, by coming to her wedding.

Now 33, Dissen was born in India, moved to New Jersey at age 8 and to Waynesville at 13, where, she says, falling in love with nature was easy. She and her parents spent plenty of time hiking in the mountains. It was on a family excursion through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park that she first made the leap to an awful awareness. “The view was obscured by pollution,” Dissen says. “I felt hurt. I felt this wasn’t right. I knew we (humans) were the problem.”

And, as she discovered, it’s a complex problem. She went to high school at the North Carolina School of Science and Math in Durham, then college at NC State, where she received degrees in civil and environmental engineering, systems analysis and business. Then, at a consulting job with Accenture, a national consulting firm, she worked with large-scale utility companies on the East and West Coasts. Ostensibly, she was helping these companies optimize production and performance, but she had a not-so-secret question to answer: Why did’t they use existing sustainable and green production methods? She offered options to her clients and, Dissen says, was convinced that federal mandates would force them to become environmental stewards. But after nine years of waiting for that to happen, Dissen says, she just became too impatient.

So, she took a leap—all the way to Jakarta, in Southeast Asia, as regional coordinator for the William J. Clinton Foundation Climate Initiative. “I was totally out of my comfort zone,” she laughs. “I went from a private company to a non-profit, I didn’t know the language, I had no family there.” Worst, her new boyfriend, Bill Dissen, was back in the U.S. “We dated on Skype,” she says. Still, she spent a year working with local governments in Hanoi, Bangkok and Jakarta to implement green waste management processes before coming back to Asheville. Meanwhile, her fiancé had just purchased The Market Place restaurant on Wall Street downtown (he’s also the executive chef).

When Dissen heard about the new CICS program, a collaboration with NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center—the largest collection of climate data in the world—she knew her stars had aligned. She could finally work in Asheville and work to educate people about climate change. In particular, she coaches private companies about how to reduce climate change in ways that make economic sense. She spends her days teaching people things like how the weather affects a business on a sub-decadal time scale . “It’s a big responsibility,” she says of her work. “And complex—sometimes I feel despair—but there are so many factors, always changing, and I do have hope.”