Some people work inside very large companies and still have almost nobody around them who understands their job.
That came up early in my conversation with Vera DeVera, who led community at Watershed. Many of the sustainability professionals she worked with sit inside enterprise companies with tens of thousands of employees, yet the actual sustainability team may consist of one to five people.
They’re expected to influence complex decisions across finance, operations, legal, procurement, and leadership. In many cases, the role itself is still new. There may not be an established playbook, a large internal team, or a long line of experienced peers sitting nearby.
The company is large. The work can still feel very solitary.
Vera has spent much of her career building communities for people in that kind of position. Before Watershed, she built programs at early-stage companies where emerging professional roles were trying to establish themselves at the same time as the companies serving them.
What she’s building now gives sustainability leaders something they often can’t get inside their own organizations: a team of peers who understand the work.
People arrive through different doors
Vera’s own path into sustainability wasn’t traditional.
She came from community, not environmental science. What drew her to Watershed was the chance to bring her professional experience into a company whose mission aligned with her personal values.
The people in the community have similarly varied backgrounds.
Some studied environmental science and built their careers around the field. Others volunteered to lead a workplace recycling or sustainability effort, became more involved over time, and eventually helped create a formal role inside the company.
That range matters because emerging functions rarely develop in a straight line.
People are learning the technical work while also figuring out how to explain it internally, secure resources, and influence leaders who may not understand why it matters yet. They’re often developing the role at the same time they’re performing it.
Community becomes useful because it gives them access to people at different points along the same path.
Someone who has just inherited sustainability responsibilities can learn from someone who built a program two years earlier. A more experienced leader can compare notes with peers facing the same regulatory or organizational pressure. The expertise doesn’t flow in only one direction.
The four C’s
Vera describes community through four C’s:
Connection
Collaboration
Commiseration
Celebration
The inclusion of commiseration is important.
Professional communities often emphasize expertise, best practices, and success stories. Those things are useful, but people also need somewhere to say that the work isn’t going well.
That can be difficult inside a company.
A sustainability leader may be trying to build support for a new initiative, complete a complicated reporting process, or secure headcount. Admitting uncertainty internally can carry political or professional risk, especially when the function is already fighting for credibility.
A trusted peer community gives people somewhere to be more honest.
They can say, “I’m stuck,” or “I tried this and it failed,” and hear from someone who has dealt with something similar. The conversation can remain private enough to be useful and specific enough to lead to action.
That kind of safety has practical value. People surface problems earlier, learn from one another’s mistakes, and gain confidence before returning to the internal conversations where they still have to make the case.
Community as an external team
Vera described the community as something close to an extended team.
That’s more than a nice metaphor.
She has watched people meet through dinners and events, become accountability partners, and continue helping each other across companies and cities. Some members now have someone they can call when they’re facing a problem their internal colleagues don’t fully understand.
That relationship changes the experience of the role.
The member still has to do the work inside their own company. Community doesn’t remove the organizational constraints, and it doesn’t give them formal authority. What it can provide is a place to test ideas, compare experience, and avoid starting from scratch every time.
For emerging functions, that’s a substantial advantage.
The community also helps members become more influential inside their organizations. They can bring back examples, language, approaches, and evidence from peers who have faced similar resistance. The community gives them a broader base of practical knowledge than their internal team alone could provide.
Listening before building
When Vera joined Watershed, the company had already created the community role. She still didn’t start with a predetermined program.
She began with a listening tour.
Internally, she talked with customer success, product, and other GTM teams that were already close to customers. Externally, she spoke with dozens of customers and asked questions about how they learned, what problems they were facing, how they wanted to connect with peers, and what they could teach others.
That last question is especially useful.
Community discovery often focuses on what people need. Vera also looked for what they could contribute.
She wanted to identify the people who had experience worth sharing, then create the conditions where that experience could help someone else. That approach treats members as participants in the value creation, rather than an audience waiting for the company to deliver everything.
It also reflects something I wrote about in The Community Code: the company can design and steward the system, but much of the value comes from what members create together.
Trust is built through curation
Vera’s work includes a lot of deliberate matchmaking.
She pays attention to who is struggling with a particular problem, who has recently solved something similar, and who might benefit from being in the same room. Sometimes the most useful outcome from an event isn’t the content on stage. It’s the person someone meets over dinner.
That kind of curation can look informal from the outside. It still requires judgment.
A good community builder notices patterns, remembers context, and understands enough about the members to make useful connections. The goal isn’t to force relationships. It’s to create enough proximity and relevance for the right conversations to happen.
This is one area where scale can become misleading.
A community may have thousands of members, but the value often appears through much smaller interactions. One introduction, one peer conversation, or one honest admission can change how someone approaches the work.
The numbers matter. They don’t explain the whole experience.
The business value follows the member value
Watershed didn’t create community only because sustainability leaders needed friends.
The company also sees community as a growth and retention driver. Customers who are more connected, more confident, and more successful are more likely to stay, advocate, and help others understand the value of the work.
Those business outcomes are real.
They depend on the member value coming first.
A community built primarily to extract advocacy will eventually feel extractive. A community that helps members become better at their jobs creates the conditions for advocacy to develop more naturally.
Vera’s approach starts with the work people are trying to do.
How can they become more capable? How can they feel less isolated? How can they gain more influence in rooms where they may not currently have much power?
When the community helps answer those questions, the relationship with the company becomes stronger for understandable reasons.
What this adds to the broader conversation
We spend a lot of time talking about how community creates engagement.
Vera’s example is more specific.
The community is filling an organizational gap.
It gives people access to peers their employer may not be able to provide. It creates a place for practical honesty that may not exist inside the company. It helps members develop influence in a function that is still establishing its role.
That’s a more consequential form of value than keeping people active in a platform.
It also shows why community can matter most in emerging or under-resourced roles. The need isn’t simply information. People need examples, language, reassurance, and relationships with others who understand the stakes.
A content library can help with part of that. A trusted peer usually helps with more.
Watch the conversation
In the full interview, Vera and I talk about:
How her personal values led her into sustainability community work
Why emerging professional roles often need community the most
How she conducted internal and customer listening tours
The role of peer safety and commiseration
How curated relationships turn into accountability and support
Why community can drive retention, advocacy, and growth
What she has learned building communities from zero to one
The conversation is practical and warm, which is very much Vera’s style. She has a clear point of view about the business value of community without losing sight of the people doing the work.
Decoded Takeaways
Community can become an external team for people who don’t have enough peers, support, or institutional knowledge inside their own companies. That’s especially valuable in emerging functions where people are still defining the role while trying to perform it.
Vera’s approach begins with listening. She looks at what members need, what they can teach, and where trusted relationships could make the work easier or more effective. The company creates the conditions, but members help one another produce much of the actual value.
The strongest communities also give people somewhere to be honest about what isn’t working. That kind of safety has practical consequences. Problems surface earlier, members learn from one another’s experience, and people return to their companies with more confidence and better language for influencing decisions.
For the business, the value shows up through stronger customer relationships, retention, advocacy, and growth. Those outcomes are more credible when they follow from helping members succeed, rather than treating community as a source of activity or promotion.
Timestamps
00:00 Introduction and Vera’s path into community
01:40 Vera’s four C’s of community
03:06 How people arrive in sustainability careers
04:50 Why Watershed invested in community
06:21 Similarities between emerging legal and sustainability roles
07:57 Community as an external team
10:43 Vera’s listening-tour process
11:57 Helping members become more influential
12:25 Why community needs to feel safe
