Remembering Nicky Chambers
Memories of Nicky Chambers (1966 – 2024)
Nicky Chambers was co-founder of Best Foot Forward, the very first, very early acquisition by Anthesis in 2013. When I joined as an intern in 2011, she would appear mid-afternoon in The Future Centre office in NewTech Place, Oxford, eyes bright and cheeks flushed from a cycle ride and debating [insert complex social issue/latest carbon technology/role of regenerative agriculture] with [insert local politician/university professor/Chief Sustainability Officer]. By the time she left again, wisdom would have been sprinkled over us and spirits would have been lifted. Her mantra, “what does good look like?” would ring out across the open-plan, vine-filled, Interface-floored space, followed by the whirr of our brains trying to keep pace with her ideas.
Best Foot Forward was born in 1996 from a strong desire to provide scientific based evidence to businesses wishing to make sustainability centric decisions. While there, Nicky co-authored – with Craig Simmons and Mathis Wackernagel -, Sharing Nature’s Interest – a pioneering book on ecological foot printing that introduced the concept to Europe and paved the way for carbon foot printing. This metric converts the impact of a place, activity, organization or individual into a physical number representing standardized hectares of land. In 2006, Best Foot Forward was conferred a prestigious Queens’ Award – a corporate knighthood – for their pioneering work. Nicky as helped, in 1999, to bring to market the first carbon calculator – CarbonCalc – to make use of newly published Government emission factors. Later, in 2011, she co-founded Foot printer, one of the first organizational and product foot printing software tools.
After Best Foot Forward was integrated into the then start-up Anthesis, Nicky stayed on as Director of Strategic Innovations and Futures or in her own words ‘Queen of All Things New and Shiny’. This, naturally, led her to a plethora of exciting opportunities outside our walls and she continued being a change-maker in other organisations such as Global Canopy and the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency, to name a couple.
It is hard (impossible) to encapsulate a person, a personality, a soul, in a matter of words on a screen. Nicky’s special talent was the ability to grab attention: in board rooms her opinions were always heard, her outrageous stories captivated us in the pub, and her students would soak up her teachings. Her intelligence would shine on the knottiest of environmental challenges and before you knew it you were in the MAD (Make A Difference) conference room downstairs with the whiteboard out, several cups of tea down and a plan to change the world. It felt like magic.