Christi Electris

Christi Electris is the Executive Director and co-founder of Croatan Institute and a Senior Fellow at the Institute. She has done consulting and research on a variety of environmental and social issues, including projects on energy, climate, agriculture, well-being, sustainability indicators, and corporate redesign. A computer scientist and quantitative policy analyst by training, she has designed policy scenario analyses with environmental and social impacts, including the most recent update of Tellus Institute’s global sustainability scenarios. She has also designed place-based scenarios in recycling and solid waste management, job creation, and energy efficiency, and developed cost modeling exercises. Since 2009, Electris has been a member of the team tracking trends in sustainable and responsible investing for US SIF Foundation. While at Tellus, she analyzed company practices and policies in worker equity at large public and private food and agriculture companies in a major report for the Rockefeller Foundation, and helped to develop a new framework for social and environmental impact investing across asset classes, known as Total Portfolio Activation. At Croatan Institute, she regularly contributes to the thematic application of the Total Portfolio Activation framework to the Institute’s Clean Portfolio Project and its work on sustainable food and regenerative agriculture. As part of the Ford Foundation-funded WealthWorks rural development program, she has developed and conducted several trainings on crowdfunding to support new investment into place-based rural value chains. She led a project in 2016 to help the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN) develop a new framework for guiding impact investors to select appropriate impact metrics for meeting their investment characteristics and goals, and in 2020, co-led the development of the sustainable agriculture theme for IRIS+. Christi is a trained Climate Reality Leader, and also serves on the CDFA Food System Advisory Council.

Christi has worked previously as a research associate at Tellus Institute, as a researcher at MIT Lincoln Laboratory and a research assistant at MIT’s Global System for Sustainable Development group, Laboratory for Energy and the Environment, and Sloan School of Management. 

Born and raised in a cosmopolitan Greek family in Minnesota, she has spent many summers visiting her family in Greece. She also conducted graduate field research on environmental policy and technology in Greece and the Balkans.

Electris serves on the board of Climate Action Brookline, a chapter of the Massachusetts Climate Action Network, where she is leading efforts to integrate schools and businesses into climate action town-wide. She is interested in local and sustainable food and frequents the farmers markets in the area. She enjoys snowboarding in the New England winters, and is learning how to grow her own food in the summers.

She lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.