Sigrid Wright
Sigrid Wright, CEO/Executive Director, Community Environmental Council, Growing Edge Leaders Program
Sigrid Wright never imagined her future in Santa Barbara, or at the helm of one of the Central Coast’s most respected environmental organizations. What brought her here was a mix of instinct and serendipity: a last-minute skydiving jump in her mid-twenties that gave her the courage to invite a new chapter, and an unexpected call from a hometown boy who would eventually become her husband — and her reason to return to the West Coast. “When I look back,” she said, “I can see these moments where something was telling me to pay attention — and the more I listened to that inner voice, the more that voice appeared.”
Sigrid has come to believe strongly in noticing and naming those moments. “I think we get these clues one at a time, and sometimes certain things have a kind of luminescence to them,” she said. “Learning to listen is so powerful.” Making space for that instinct has become a defining part of both her leadership and her life.
Born in Oregon, Sigrid’s upbringing was steeped in an ethic of service and environmental consciousness. Her professional path began in communications, with graduate school in Baltimore and later a competitive fellowship at the National Wildlife Federation in Washington, D.C., where she focused on environmental issues before climate change had entered the mainstream conversation. Even then, she was drawn to work that connected ideas, people, and purpose.
But Sigrid knew the East Coast was not where she would stay. After returning west, she arrived in Santa Barbara and, résumé in hand, walked into the Community Environmental Council, where she was hired on the spot. She joined CEC as a communications associate and remained with the organization, rising through its ranks over three decades before being named executive director in 2015, a role she has now held for more than a decade.
Along the way, Leading From Within became a steady companion to her growth as a leader, always arriving, as Sigrid puts it, “at the right moment at the right time.”
She first participated in Katherine Harvey Fellows in 2004, and what stayed with her most was the power of relationships. “I wasn’t raised to be thinking about having a network,” she said. “And it kind of blew my mind.” Today, she describes the lifelong friendship formed with four remarkable women through the program as “one of the greatest joys of my life,” adding that those relationships are also part of what makes her feel deeply rooted in Santa Barbara.
A few years later, Sigrid joined the inaugural cohort of Courage to Lead at a time when she was feeling professionally stuck and personally stretched. The program gave her both language and space to better understand herself as a leader. “I had to identify my leadership style and my story,” she said. Just as importantly, it introduced her to a way of being in community with other leaders that was grounded, reflective, and compassionate.
Most recently, Sigrid participated in the pilot cohort of Growing Edge Leaders. It came at a later stage in her career trajectory, with a focus on succession and on building leadership throughout her organization. The program offered peer problem-solving, skill building, and access to invaluable one-on-one coaching.
A founding board member of Leading From Within, Sigrid has watched the organization she helped build become a network she continues to rely on — one that, for her, represents one of Leading From Within’s most enduring gifts: not simply individual development, but a culture of trust among leaders. And she remains inspired by what that network can still become. “What would it look like,” she asks, “to really turn on all those lights at once?”
