Erin Hiatt - Vice President, Corporate Social Responsibility at RILA

Erin is the lead for RILA’s ESG and corporate responsibility portfolio, encompassing its Diversity Equity & Inclusion, Sustainability, and Responsible Sourcing Committees, and ESG engagement activities. She organizes educational content and convenes and facilitates benchmarking discussions, resource development, and stakeholder engagement for corporate retail issue leads in each of these areas. Erin has been with RILA since 2012, serving in a variety of roles supporting and leading the association’s CSR communities. Erin serves on the International Sustainable Standards Board’s (ISSB) Technical Reference Group.

Prior to joining RILA, Erin interned for two years with the Progress Energy as their EnergyWise (smart grid) Change Management and Business Processes Intern while finishing her undergraduate degrees.

Erin holds Bachelors of Arts in Public Policy with Honors and French from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she was the recipient of both the Edward Kidder Graham Chancellor’s Award and Michael A. Stegman Award for Policy Research and Advocacy as well as an inductee of the Order of the Golden Fleece.

Erin Joins Sustainable Nation to Discuss:

• How sustainability was embedded into the work at RILA as a trade association
• RILA’s climate action blueprint for member companies
• The development of RILAs new tool to help measure scope 3 emissions in collaboration with Optera
• Engaging members in advocacy for climate related initiatives
• Advice and recommendations for sustainability professionals 

Erin’s Final Five Questions Responses:

What is one piece of advice you would give other sustainability professionals that might help them in their careers? 

Invest in being a really good listener. I think that a lot of folks go into sustainability because they have a major passion for it, and they want to help other folks see the world and things as they do. But at the end of the day, the best communicators, the best collaborators are really good listeners, really good empathizers. 

What are you most excited about right now in the world of sustainability? 

I am probably biased working for a trade association, but I feel like we are entering this era of creative and widespread collaboration. We're recognizing which of these challenges are too big for an individual company to take on on their own, any individual player in the space. So it's some of the projects like the DPED database with Optera, that sort of thing where we're hearing creative ideas, we're seeing them and trying to make sure that we're elevating them and giving them space so that as many companies can collaborate in them as one. So this era of collaboration has been really exciting to see, 

What is one book you would recommend sustainability professionals read? 

I would say first and foremost to read whatever gives you energy and be creative first and foremost. I think that's a big part of staying sane in this space, and I see reading as an outlet to really relax and again, think creatively. I like reading Sci-Fi.  I will say I think that Alison Taylor's Higher Ground that just came out, I haven't finished it yet, but to the point about being a good communicator, there's such a focus on people and such a focus on trust in that book. I think it gets back to that communicator role and us remembering at the at the end of the day that we're trying to collaborate and work with and understand how others think and feel. 

What are some of your favorite resources or tools that really help you in your work? 

Two structural frameworks that have helped guide my thinking a lot are some of the pillars around design thinking and systems thinking and that question of how might we that a lot of those leverage. I think it's a really good process for again, empathizing with your user so to speak, your end consumer. What do we really want to get to? Who needs to be involved? Who can we ask? And the value of quick iteration on an idea. It's easy to come up with something that we think is going to fix everything or be a silver bullet, and it's really about being willing to adjust so that it gets to where everyone needs it to be. I also think another one that's been interesting for me to learn more about is that my partner is actually a product manager and I've started to find myself adopting some of his processes around how you set up stakeholder engagement and how you really reflect on a project and break down the needs there. So I think borrowing from those other frameworks that well serve any issue set  that structures your thinking to to empathize, think creatively, but also be something that's pretty intuitive when you read about it, it clicks pretty quickly. 

Where can our listeners go to learn more about you and the work being done at RILA? 

I would definitely say to check out our website, as you discovered. I love how much we're able to post publicly because we know it'll be beneficial beyond just the retail industry. So certainly the holistic sustainability ESG content that we have on the site and then on LinkedIn as well. I always like to talk about what we're doing there, and that's certainly my favorite way for connecting with folks.