Staff Spotlight: Amanda Sardonis

Amanda Sardonis loves and lives her work. As Associate Director of the Environment and Natural Resources Program (ENRP), she supports the program’s research, manages student engagement and fellowship programs—including  the full-tuition Roy Fellowship—and runs the entire selection process for the prestigious Roy Award for Environmental Partnership presented by Harvard Kennedy School every two years.

A big part of her job is staying on top of what’s happening in the environmental space so she can help students engage in relevant fieldwork. This awareness is also essential in managing the Roy Award selection, a lengthy process that seeks the most effective environmental partnerships in the world. Her ENRP portfolio is full and varied, but she is especially proud of her work with the Roy Award.

“We’re shining a light on good things that are happening around the world environmentally,” she says. These partnerships “are extremely important and very hard to do, and the participants don’t generally get the recognition they deserve.”

Inspired by the Roy Award, she wrote her Harvard masters thesis on “Measuring Success in Environmental Partnerships” and leads a research project on partnership effectiveness, analyzing data collected from the program since 2003.

Outside of work, Sardonis tries to be conscious of her family’s carbon footprint. Choosing not to own a car, she rides her three-person bike year-round, dropping off and picking up her six- and four-year olds at school and daycare.  A vegetarian, she loves to cook and her kids choose what vegetables to grow in their community garden plot.

In her 13 years at ENRP, she has managed a number of projects and interacted with hundreds of “amazing” students and leaders. Witnessing the positive impact of that work, she says, is “pretty cool.”