Burlington Standard

The University of Vermont issued the following announcement.

One testament to the scale, reach and popularity of soccer, or football, as it’s typically called around the world; is there are more countries affiliated with the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA)–the governing body of the sport since 1904–than the United Nations.

Truly it is the global game.

With that backdrop, UVM Sustainable Innovation MBA (SI-MBA) graduate Keil Corey ’19 and partners founded Vermont Green FC this year. A USL League 2 football club based in Vermont, but with a bigger goal in mind than just adding to the local sports landscape. 

Creating a mission-driven sports club focused on environmental justice.

Matthew Wolff, Sam Glickman and Keil Corey all met playing soccer at Skidmore College. Matt had gone on to work in pro-soccer as a graphic designer with Nike, designing the 2018 World Cup winning kit worn by France among others. His career also exposed him to sport executives in the U.S. with whom he learned about how to run a soccer club, and create a culture, brand, and develop community connections. 

“He started thinking the global game was under-utilized when it came to taking on the big issues of the day, climate change and systemic racism, which is when he got in touch with me,” says Corey.

“Due to our soccer connection, my SI-MBA education, and as I’ve lived in Vermont most of my life, he pitched the idea of starting a club here. After he contacted me, it didn’t take me very long to say this is too cool to pass up; bringing my two worlds together in a way I could not have imagined. Matt had spent time visiting the state and had made many Vermont connections through his college soccer career. He understood what the community was like, and it was such a great fit for the club. That a mission-driven club focused on environmental justice would resonate here.”

Corey continued. “With Matt’s connections, we brought in more people to the team. Colin Kelly had previously worked with Major League Soccer teams LAFC and NYCFC. Benjamin Aziz had professional sports experience in marketing, branding, and corporate partnerships, while Sam Glickman worked for a fin-tech start-up and brought an understanding of how to scale a small operation quickly and effectively.

Patrick Infurna was another early founder, whose full-time work is with German Bundesliga (Division 1) professional team Eintracht Frankfurt. Patrick works on their English language media in the U.S. market, as well as being heavily involved with supporter culture storytelling around the world. “He has been instrumental in helping us integrate our mission with soccer culture here at home, and around the world. He is also a Vermonter so has helped me and the team stay true to the eclectic nature of the broader Vermont community,” says Corey.

Then there’s Connor Tobin and Cassidy Sepnieski, who joined the founders group in early 2022. Tobin arrived as a recently retired professional soccer player, having spent over a decade playing professionally in the U.S. and Norway. He also played his college soccer at the University of Vermont. “Connor has been an essential piece to our operational puzzle, ensuring our matchday operations are running at a professional level, helping us prioritize and deliver a high value experience for the players, and generally acting as a Swiss army knife throughout the entire operation,” says Corey. Tobin is also the Executive Director of the USL Players Association, the exclusive collective bargaining representative for all current players in both the USL Championship and USL League One.

Sepnieski is a graphic designer by trade and has worked in professional sports marketing and event management, helping the club deliver on their ambitions to provide fans a professional-level matchday and online experience. “Cassidy is a creative powerhouse and an experienced pro-sports event manager who has helped us elevate the fan experience well beyond what we thought we could pull off in our first season.”

Corey had an idea there would be a soccer market here in Vermont, but so far, the reality has been surprising. “I had an inkling there would be interest, but it has far exceeded our wildest dreams. We had more than 1,000 people at our first game here in Burlington, and for a USL League 2 team that’s very respectable.

So many people have stepped forward to get involved, volunteer and spend their free time on this project to help us to succeed. It’s been incredible. There’s been a healthy amount of planning and organization, and about 50% of just serendipity. Good luck that the right people heard about us, connected with us and we realized due to these relationships people were very much on board with the mission. They are passionate about what we were doing and taking our organization to a level we did not expect at the beginning.”

Collaborating to Succeed

For Corey, the willingness of so many people and organizations to step forward and get involved is encouraging, and in line with his experience working in the sustainability field.

“My SI-MBA, and subsequent consulting experience, showed me how it’s about collaborating to succeed. Whether it’s individuals showing interest, competitors in the league, and other organizations and businesses who have similar products and services, we’re all just helping each other at the end of the day, because everyone in the space has that drive to do something positive in the world. Having that purpose cuts through it all. Folks also want us to succeed because we’re trying to prove a model that doesn’t really exist at scale yet. There’s a rich camaraderie and learning environment. I think it’s an important message.”

One main tenet of the SI-MBA program is to use business as a force for good. To that end, the club embeds environmental justice into its mission, strategy, operational processes, and culture, setting out five goals: fight systemic racism, as a 1% For the Planet member donate 1% of their annual sales to environmental nonprofits, become net-zero, use circular economy principles for merchandise, and continually use their platform to educate and raise awareness to create positive change through the lens of environmental justice.

For Corey, the five goals were a tangible way to weave environmental justice principles into their mission, but also to tie them to proven climate science, for example with the net-zero goal.

“With three current SI-MBA students’ help, we're assessing our carbon footprint and reduction plan, that will eventually include net-zero targets following the guidance of the Science Based Targets initiative. We wanted to make sure we are doing this credibly and in line with what the science tells us we need to do to become net-zero, and not just making claims out of thin air. The students bring a high level of scrutiny to this process which is helpful for me with so much else going on; and it’s been a fun partnership too.”

Building Community

With the club’s goals Vermont Green FC felt it was vital to build strong local community ties. “Juba Star FC is the club we’re partnering with this season. It’s primarily a refugee and immigrant run club, and an organization built over the past 16 years started by members of the Somali Bantu community. It has a men’s league soccer club which is how I got connected as I played against them for years,” says Corey.

“They run a men’s club as well as youth clubs which are all entirely free. They also provide additional services such as academic or career mentorship, and social support for these kids. There’s some incredible, not just footballing, but community building stories coming out of Juba. We need to learn from organizations in the community who are already doing this work. Who are already building community in an effective and inclusive way.

We're having a fundraiser to finance the cost of tournament travel for them.  There is a long-running Somali-led tournament in Kentucky, and Juba participate every year. It's an international open cup and brings together clubs that have a lot of former refugees and immigrants, as well as players born and raised in the U.S. It's a great recruiting platform for these players, but an expensive endeavor that they finance from their own pockets and from members of the community, as they try to make it free for players to represent Juba there. 

Vermont Green FC are helping fundraise to offset those costs, and we're also going to offset carbon emissions from their travel to that tournament. We are going to be purchasing verified carbon credits likely from a project we've found in Somalia. The project hits on several issues that are important for that community in terms of health, reducing the carbon impact and creating local entrepreneurial ventures and businesses, while reducing the strain on natural resources from cutting down forests. 

The platform we use is Gold Standard. They're one of the top two brokers of carbon offsets in the world. They work closely with the United Nations and highlight the UNs SDGs in all their project work. This means you are getting a comprehensive view of what a project actually does on the local level, and that helps us assess if the project is really helping from a climate justice perspective.”

The club has been able to partner and collaborate with numerous other business and community organizations including the Anti-Racist Soccer Club. Corey explained. “This is a coalition of former and current professional players, and sports organizations experts, trying to scale anti-racist actions and behaviors in U.S. soccer.  After learning more about them, we quickly realized if we want to succeed with our environmental justice mission, we have to better understand what anti-racism looks like, how it is intertwined with environmental issues, and how to embed it into the DNA of our club.

They are also very interested in environmental justice. Their platform understandably focuses on the social justice principles of anti-racist work. Environmental challenges are linked to systemic racism, but they haven’t yet started working at that intersection. It’s exciting to be in a partnership where we’re learning a lot from each other every week and have a shared vision for scaling our respective missions.

Like the net-zero work, we also wanted to make sure that if we're going to do these things, to make these claims, we need to hold ourselves accountable, produce the plans and submit them to the experts, so they can tell us if we're on the right path moving towards the goals that we're setting.”

Corey concluded. “My SI-MBA experience has informed so much of how this club runs and especially the environmental justice mission itself.  Prior to SI-MBA I had worked in environmental advocacy and the solar industry, but it was at SI-MBA that I really started to understand that the best way to address environmental issues is by addressing the intrinsic social injustices. 

When you consider social inequities in addressing environmental issues, you're giving a voice to the people in the communities who live in that environment, and you're coming up with the solutions to what they need at the end of the day.  It's a much more efficient and effective way to solve these problems. I learned in SI-MBA it's not a simple process by any means, but if you use that lens when you approach these challenges the solutions often reveal themselves through the process you've decided to take. Yes, it takes time, because building trusted relationships takes time. It is a process fundamentally based on listening to understand, having an open mind and compassionate heart, and working with stakeholders.

If people don't see the real impact in their lived experience, they're not going to support the project at the end of the day. 

One of the biggest reasons why we decided football was the right vehicle, was because many of us had experience playing soccer in diverse communities around the world, and when you bring this little ball with you and you put it down on the ground in a park, or at the beach, you instantly make friends. That's the connection. I think people who know football and play it understand that inherently, and other people who play other sports don't quite grasp the universality of the beautiful game; it's very unique to football.”

Vermont Green FC plays all its home games at University of Vermont’s Virtue Field.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Original source can be found here.