Darcy Hitchcock
Senior Fellow in Social Innovation
Darcy Hitchcock is leading the Sustainability Alliance, a coalition of local nonprofits working across disciplines to lead Northern/Central Arizona toward sustainability. Their organization has deployed a business certification, offers an annual conference for teachers and is developing a dashboard of community indicators based on the UN Sustainable Development Goals. This is her idea of “retirement.”
Darcy also was one of four founding members of the International Society of Sustainability Professionals and still teaches a distance learning class on Assessing Organizational Sustainability.
From 1990 to 2013, Darcy was president of AXIS Performance Advisors, a management consulting firm that first focused on highly empowered work teams and then transitioned to organizational sustainability around 1997. She and her partner, Marsha Willard, developed groundbreaking processes for assessing sustainability and developing sustainability plans. For approximately five years, Darcy taught at the prestigious Bainbridge Graduate Institute, one of the first MBA programs to integrate sustainability throughout the curriculum.
Throughout the years, Darcy has published 10 business books and countless articles. The first edition of The Business Guide to Sustainability (now in its third edition) won the American Library Association’s Choice Award for best academic titles.
Prior to AXIS, Darcy was an instructional designer and trainer, with an expertise in building instructional games and simulations.
Darcy views herself as a practitioner, not an academic. She is drawn to emerging fields, seeing opportunities, and inventing solutions. She lives in Sedona with her husband and two dogs. She enjoys hiking, kayaking, and volunteer vacations.
