Alaina Harkness, AM’06, on Protecting Water and Building the Blue Economy

Alaina Harkness, AM’06, has an impeccable resume: UChicago graduate, Brookings Institution, MacArthur Foundation, Chicago Council on Global Affairs. A native of south suburban Park Forest, Illinois, Harkness is a veteran of the worlds of philanthropy, economic development, and the environment. She currently serves as the CEO of Current, a Chicago-based water innovation hub, and CEO of Great Lakes ReNEW, the NSF-funded Great Lakes Water Innovation Engine. Both Current and Great Lakes ReNEW are at the forefront of the blue economy,  which is centered on the sustainable use of our water resources for inclusive economic growth here in Illinois, as well as nationally.

Can you describe your path to the Harris School of Public Policy? 

I was already enrolled in a master’s degree program in Latin American Studies at the University of Chicago. I was doing all this ethnographic research but feeling torn about what direction I was going to take that. Harris had this creative opening-up of the one-year MA program to students who were already pursuing another graduate degree, so I enrolled and had a concentration in the nonprofit philanthropy track.  

What was your cohort like? 

I felt like I’d found my people the minute I walked through the door. Movers, shakers, policymakers. It was people who wanted to do great work in the world. And it was people who were either pursuing or had already served in jobs that I was intrigued by. 

Who really influenced you during that year? 

Don Stewart, a former professor and the former head of the Chicago Community Trust. I took his philanthropy class, which exposed me to thinking about what a career in philanthropy could look like, which very few people grow up wanting to have. And he said, “I really think you should apply for this internship at the Chicago Community Trust.” It was the best decision I could have possibly made. I got a 30,000-foot view of what made the city work, all the different issues: food insecurity, housing, workforce development, planning issues, sustainable transportation. And I saw how everyone framed up the problems and what they’re trying to do about it.  

I was at the Trust for three and a half years after that internship and met my future boss, Maria Hibbs, who staffed the Partnership for New Communities. I’m not sure what Don Stewart saw in me specifically, but he understood my interests were a great match. I’m so grateful I took his advice.  

Did you have a plan when you left Harris?

I had really clear interests, but I didn’t have a plan. The connection between money, culture, and power interested me a lot. Institutions interested me too—how you build them, how they work, or how they don’t. How do we build more equitable cities but also cities that work for the planet? What does it mean to tackle the legacy of disinvestment and inequality and inequity, systemic racism, all those things that create problematic conditions in our cities? 

What drew you toward working at Current?

I wanted to wake up every single day thinking about climate and the environment first and to stay in economic development, working on people-first strategies around workforce development or neighborhood development. People have been pointing out for a long time that our waterways are largely still taken for granted, both the river and the lake. I still don’t think we are conscious of what it means to live in the place where we have 90 percent of the U.S.’s fresh surface water. It’s here for our benefit, and we take it for granted at our peril. We must get out of this mindset that it is infinite because, while it is abundant, and that is wonderful for us, we’ve got to start using it more sustainably. 

Your organization, Current, recently landed a ten-year, $160 million grant from the National Science Foundation. Where will that money go? 

Our grant is focused on creating the technologies and powering the solutions that will actually help us use our water better and make sure we’re not flushing any valuable resources down the drain—and that we’re getting all the contaminants out. For example, there are valuable recoverable materials in wastewater.   

If you’re talking about a mine site, it can include the lithium we need to make batteries. If you’re talking about an agriculture site, it can mean flushing excess phosphorus and nitrogen, which crushes ecosystems downstream, with terrible results for the Gulf of Mexico. If you can recover that phosphorus, that’s an element in limited supply that is creating supply chain shortages for fertilizer, which we need for food production. That fundamental problem of selectively separating everything in our water and wastewater, recovering what’s valuable, and eliminating what could be harmful—that’s a grand science challenge.   

Why do we need to focus on the blue economy? 

We all need water for survival. It cuts across every other industry. It’s part of manufacturing, it’s part of food and beverage production, it’s part of our energy production, frankly. It takes water to make energy. It takes a lot of energy to move, manage, and treat our water. They’re thinking about semiconductor production and how we remain competitive in the high performance and quantum computing race. We should be thinking about all those things, but those are all water-dependent in some way. 

How does the next generation factor in? 

We do STEM programming now. The kids in our region all have this natural exposure to a Great Lake and these great rivers. How do we get them excited about the many different ways that you could work in water? We took high school students to the Department of Water Management and showed them the plant. It’s fascinating, but if you don’t expose kids to that and you’re not talking about those careers, the pathways aren’t clear. Right now, it’s a sector with an aging workforce that lacks diversity in all kinds of ways, and there’s massive opportunities to train the next generation and plug them in to good paying jobs all over the place. 

Do you think about water all the time? 

I do. Being a CEO of a nonprofit means you’re constantly thinking about it in some way. But in my recreational time, a lot of it is on the water, too. In the summer I really love to sail. That’s a Wednesday night thing in the city, beer can races. I love to swim, so you will find me at Promontory Point a lot. And my husband and I are really into the eBirding citizen science community. We spend a lot of time documenting nature in our big backyard of the greater South Side.  

Where do you see this issue in ten years? 

I’m confident that in ten years, we’ll still have big problems to solve and a lot of good jobs that need to be filled. But if we’ve done our job, in ten years we’re going to be a lot closer to achieving the vision of mainstream public awareness of the value of our water. We won’t take it for granted the way we do today. We will make progress on the selective separation grand challenge that will help keep our water clean and recover the valuable resources it carries. Industry partners will be recognized for their water innovation leadership because it will help them find efficiencies, create value, and derisk their business. Careers in the blue economy will become part of our educational curricula, just like the way STEM training has become more embedded. Right now, we’re building a collaborative problem-solving engine that we hope will be self-sustaining in a decade because the partners find value in being at the table. We have nearly 60 partners already in this coalition across the six-state region, and growing. The Midwest is the place to build this innovation ecosystem. We’ve got the talent, the innovation assets, the industry leaders, the venture community that we need to make this happen. Working together, we can build a pipeline of technologies and practices we need to make this big transformation happen at scale.

Do you have any advice for current Harris School students? 

I’m a big advocate for building in time for moments of slowed-down reflection to absorb and process  work and life, which in our entrepreneurial universe can be very fast-paced and intense. There’s a strong tendency to constantly be doing. All my biggest breakthroughs have come in those moments of quiet reflection. Harris attracts ambitious, externally focused people that are trying to do a lot. So, be mindful of the advice to “slow down to speed up” — nurturing that interior side will give you a lot of your best insights and allow you to connect with yourself, your team and your collaborators on a deeper level.