Irma Sitompul

An environmentalist and human ecologist, Irma believes that anyone, anywhere can play an active role in shaping a more resilient future. For the past eight years, she has been on a mission to find ground-up solutions that can support communities, specifically those who live in sub-urban and rural areas, to become the stewards of change. She does this through her work as Women’s Earth Alliance’s Southeast Asia Program Director.

Focusing her work in Indonesia, Irma is currently facilitating the leadership and impact growth of 73 environmental women leaders in 22 Indonesian provinces through our Grassroots Accelerator that she co-designed and implemented. She has also launched several impact programs with WEA including the eco-entrepreneurship accelerator and the Communal Forest pilot project with Pratisara Bumi Foundation, a non-profit organization she founded in Indonesia. She is also responsible for managing partnerships with WEA’s global partners in Indonesia and is excited to expand her scope beyond the archipelago. 

Her personal mission is to reshape the narrative of sustainability to be centered on local wisdom and economic justice as well as uplift the lives of our rural producers. This is why she is also actively involved in several initiatives such as the Earth-centered Coalition, a national working group that aims to build the ecosystem that strengthen the value chain of sustainability-centered businesses, and the Innovation for Sustainability Alliance, a global collective working on developing a set of fundamental principles to trigger change in the sustainability startup ecosystem.