Get to know the Funga crew with this newest installment of our "Meet the Team" series. Come back monthly to meet more team members, hear about their journey to Funga, and understand their vital role in our community.
We’re big fans of the “Today I get to….” mentality. So, what do you get to do every day at Funga?
I manage most of Funga’s public-facing content. I created the logo and mapped out a vision for the brand’s aesthetic and voice, built the website, and designed our initial pitch materials. Now my role has grown to include management of our social media channels, writing and managing our newsletters and blogs, website updates, and addressing any design needs from the team. If you’re a fan of Funga and have been following our progress through these channels, most of what you’ve read or seen came through me!
If you had to explain what Funga does to a third grader, what would you say?
There’s important stuff in the ground that trees need in order to grow. Sometimes, there isn’t much of that stuff left in the ground, and the trees can’t grow as tall. We put the important stuff back, and we watch the trees grow waaaaaay bigger than the trees we left alone (those are sad trees).
Tell us a little bit about your life. How did it lead you to Funga?
I’ve been a lifelong creative, dabbling in a bit of everything from oil painting to writing comics, but ultimately connecting with the practicality and real-world applications of graphic design. After college, I got a job on the communications team in the College of Natural Sciences at UT Austin. The projects that I most enjoyed in this role were those in which I had to explain a very technical scientific concept in a way that would be digestible for a general audience. These often took the form of infographics, which were such a fun blend of creating aesthetically engaging visuals while solving an intellectual puzzle.
After six years in this position, life circumstances (a move abroad!) took me in a different direction and I started full-time freelance. This allowed me to pursue a wider variety of projects, but remained interested in projects that involved demystifying data and connecting experts with the public.
During this time, my partner had started pitching a little startup idea. Naturally, I helped design the slide deck. Then a few more slide decks. Then a logo. Then a website. When the pitch earned a bit of funding and then became a real full-fledged startup, I was still the closest thing our very small team had to a communications professional, so I had to branch out past design tasks and handle things like writing and managing content. It has been a fun (and only occasionally daunting) opportunity to grow my professional skill set, and I have loved being a part of this team and seeing this idea become a large-scale climate-impacting reality.
What is your favorite part of the job?
One of my favorite things about Funga’s culture is our commitment to evidence-based decision making. This comes from having a scientific founder and a science-oriented mission, but the team has stuck to this logic for many other important decisions as well. This approach seems obvious at first, and one might reasonably assume that every decision of any significance happens this way. But time and again I have come to realize that countless consequential pivots in corporate and political realms have just come down to vibes. The world runs on influential people saying “Eh, I have a good feeling about it though”. Not at Funga! In everything we do, we let the evidence guide us.
What is one workflow/productivity tool or trick that you can’t live without?
I put everything, and I do mean every conceivable task or responsibility, on either my Google Calendar as a task or on a habit tracking app. There is nothing so satisfying as seeing a full day of little boxes, which have now been grayed out because you, the scheduling superhero, did it all. The habit app takes this victorious sentiment a step further, and makes the screen explode with digital confetti once the last item has been checked (and it is the only reason I floss daily). Funga has just started using Asana for our project management, and let me tell you, the first time I hit the Complete button and a UNICORN flew across the screen?? I said “Asana, we’re going to get along”.
What trivia round would you know every answer to?
Hairstyles, they fascinate me. I enjoy learning about weird historical hair trends, societal expectations/reactions to hairstyle changes of public figures, and I’ve developed a pretty encyclopedic knowledge of hairstyles themselves. Don’t even get me started on hair in film, potentially one of the most under-appreciated artistic mediums.
Can you share a favorite memory of/with the Funga team?
We rented a karaoke room during one of our first offsite trips. Most of us chose from the catalog of typical millennial adolescence, a roaring good time in and of itself. But one team member surprised us all by singing exclusively Disney classics, starting with “Under the Sea”. Funniest karaoke strategy of all time.
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