Supporting tomorrow’s sustainability leaders

By Eric Gallippo | Photos by Marc-Grégor Campredon (for the Erb Institute) and Miguel Andrés Sossa-Mardomingo

Miguel Andrés Sossa-Mardomingo’s new scholarship fund started as a dream to do more.

Traveling the world as a sustainability consultant, the University of Michigan alumnus observed an upsetting pattern: Many companies want to support marginalized communities—which often bear the brunt of climate change—but the number of leaders from those communities is disproportionately low.

So Sossa-Mardomingo (MBA, MS ’13) started thinking a decade ago about how to encourage students from underrepresented backgrounds to follow their dreams of working in sustainability.

“I find that if you have that lived experience, your ability to understand, comprehend, and connect back with others tends to be higher and stronger,” he said. “So the goal is, ‘How do we get more people that have participated in a particular space that is often more impacted more involved so that they can help us shape and think and be a part of that conversation?’”

He also noted that, for a long time, the sustainability field has been largely equated with nonprofit work and doing good, but not necessarily with doing well or helping businesses grow.

“This scholarship fund is aimed at quashing that idea and sharing that, you can do good, you can do well, and do it with great people to truly transform this need that we have as a global society to address climate change and its social and environmental impacts.”

Sossa-Mardomingo and his wife, Marie-Lise Perrault, founded the MÁS Scholarship Fund for graduate students earning a dual degree through U‑M’s Erb Institute. Founded in 1996 with backing from Frederick Erb (BBA ’47) and his wife, Barbara, the institute started as a dual-degree program for students pursuing an M.B.A. from the  Stephen M. Ross School of Business and an M.S. from the School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS). Today, the program’s focus on business sustainability includes academic and applied research, and partner projects with companies and nonprofits.

The son of a Cuban refugee and Colombian farmer, Sossa-Mardomingo came to U‑M in 2010 to pursue an M.B.A. with plans of working in real estate, but that changed when he discovered the Erb Institute.

“They influenced me to think long and hard about how I could take a second degree in environmental science and really think more broadly about how I wanted to apply sustainability and what I did with the next phase of my career,” he said. “I’m super thankful to the community at Erb and SEAS and Ross who helped propel me to go and explore as many things as I could.”

As a student, Sossa-Mardomingo represented U‑M at conferences in South Africa and Qatar and helped instructors lead cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in disaster preparedness training in Mexico. In Indonesia, he and his classmates spent two years studying the impacts of plastic waste on communities near landfills and then made recommendations to corporations sending their recycling there.

“I don't know too many other universities that offer those types of experiences,” he said. “It certainly informed who I've become and helped me think a little more globally and propel what I'm able to do today in my current role.”

With the initial investment made, Sossa-Mardomingo is now working to grow the fund in hopes of creating an endowment that exists in perpetuity. To that end, labeling the MÁS scholarship with his initials—“mas,” in Spanish, also translates to “more”—is about wanting to inspire other Latin Americans to dream big and give back however they can. 

“I'm very excited and very honored to be paying it forward for the support I received to come through Michigan, and it’s been great to hear from alums and friends and community leaders and mentors,” he said. “Our work is never done, so it's great to have folks continuing behind me, people setting the path in front of me, and just being able to reach up and back to ensure that we get to do it together.”