Helene is a Senior Capital Markets and Policy Officer for CDP, a global non-profit that runs the world’s environmental disclosure system for companies, cities, states and regions.
Helene Procoudine-Gorsky, MPA
Before discovering my weird obsession for public policy, I was following a path fairly common for most young people studying business and economics in Paris. The path that ends up somewhere in the financial sector. I worked a bit in the industry, in asset management, investment banking, and I liked some aspects of it, but it didn’t feel quite right. At least, it felt incomplete. As is still the case today, there were so many things happening in the world back then - conflicts, geopolitics, soaring inequalities - but also a lot of hopes that we could try and do something about those issues. So, I decided to follow a gut feeling instead.
I joined the MPA in 2016. I received my acceptance letter the day Brexit was voted, and moved to London not knowing anyone or what to expect. It was probably one of the best decisions of my life. Not only because of the quality of the program and how it shaped my way of thinking, but also because I met the most incredible group of people, now friends. We all came from different academic backgrounds, countries, with ages ranging from around twenty to forty years old. Yet, we all shared this weird obsession for public policy. And we had so much to discuss and learn from each other, which made those two years very (very) fun.
I graduated in 2018 and ended up... back in finance!! But since then, I had realised that finance wasn't the issue per se, but what you do with it that mattered to me. I started working at BlackRock where at the time sustainable finance was growing big. I got lucky enough to be involved in great research and thinking around sustainability, and how climate change was transforming our understanding of economic risks and opportunities. With this came an inevitable focus on the EU sustainable finance policies and the crucial need for data. Which led me to my next best life decision. I moved to Berlin and started working at CDP, an NGO specialized in climate and nature-related topics and on how to utilise data for decision making. I became a member of the EU Platform on Sustainable Finance, a group advising the European Commission on sustainable finance policies.
This time I’m working with financial institutions and policy makers, to help them make better investments and shape evidence-based policy decisions for our economies to transition towards sustainability. The sort of critical thinking and the tools required to make changes happen in the field of climate and environmental issues, I wouldn’t have built without the MPA and the people I met there. So honestly, thank you for this!