16 February, 2022
Tia Alahuhta joins the Built by Nature team as Development Manager
Tia Alahuhta joins the Built by Nature team as Development Manager
Built by Nature is delighted to announce the appointment of Tia Alahuhta as Development Manager, to play a vital role in developing and nurturing a community of donors and supporters in the built environment along the timber building transformation journey. She will help shape, lead, and scale donor-focused partnerships for Built by Nature in service of its mission while supporting the creation of an ecosystem of solutions to accelerate the timber building transformation.
Tia brings a decade of experience in managing strategic partnerships in the sustainability and non-profit sectors, predominantly working with trusts and foundations and bilateral and multilateral funders. She has successfully led and managed fundraising efforts in the areas of proposal writing, donor management and impact measurement, and is skilled at developing organisational and programmatic theories of change and other donor impact definitions.
Most recently, Tia worked as Fundraising and Philanthropic Partnerships Lead at Circle Economy, an impact organisation whose mission is to accelerate the implementation of the circular economy by empowering businesses, cities, and nations with practical and scalable solutions. There she led fundraising efforts and managed a significant funding portfolio of family and corporate foundations and built further fundraising capacity with all involved stakeholders towards effective fundraising and impact measurement.
Prior to this, Tia worked for Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) where she coordinated the full funding and project management cycle for governmental and non-governmental donors supporting the uptake of global standards for sustainability reporting. This role focused on programme development but also involved monitoring, evaluation and reporting on the implementation of funded programmes.
Tia has worked for small NGOs in the Netherlands, Spain, and Argentina contributing to tackling some of the most critical sustainability challenges of our time.
About her appointment, Tia says,
“The climate emergency calls for transformative solutions, powerful narratives and the right actors with a shared vision. It is time to be clear on what we can do, the focus of our work and how to reach our goals. One of the areas requiring immediate action and intervention is our built environment. Built by Nature, with its partners, is finally here to be part of the solution and make a transformative difference.
Built by Nature plays a crucial role in sparking further innovation and fostering cross-cutting collaborations to enable the sector to adopt new mindsets and adapt. By bringing together the right stakeholders and connecting the dots, Built by Nature acts as a catalyst for change across Europe.
I am thrilled to join Built by Nature and am looking forward to further expanding our ecosystem and network of supporters that work towards improving the climate impact of the built environment, taking investment to scale, and overcoming the most challenging barriers in the field.”
Tia holds an MSc degree in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Amsterdam and a BSc degree in Sociology from the Complutense University of Madrid, while completing a year as an exchange student at University Utrecht in the Netherlands. Born and raised in Finland, she has a deep connection with forests and nature and is constantly investigating new ways of living more sustainably.