Eliza Clark calls them the yin and yang of her life.
First, the yin: Her work helping companies go green. The 29-year-old lawyer is a principal at Paydirt, a Minneapolis consulting firm that shows clients, from Fortune 500 companies to small nonprofits, how to measure and reduce their energy footprint.
Clark’s main responsibility is building communication plans to help clients get the word out about their sustainability commitments to employees and customers, though she likes to get her hands dirty when she can.
“I just came from a meeting where we were looking in our client’s Dumpsters,” she says. “I was digging in their bathroom to count the paper towels. You have to do that. People really don’t know what they’re throwing away.”
During one recent trash-diving session, she found a BlackBerry. “It was amazing,” she says. “Obviously I’m disappointed that they threw it away, but it made a great educational tool.”
Clark spends much time educating clients on the benefits of sustainability, though she hopes that as awareness continues to grow, companies will track their own energy uses.
Things are moving, however slowly, in the right direction. “I like when the light bulb turns on for my clients that sustainability can actually be fun and creative and exciting and innovative,” she says. “A lot of them think about it as additional rules or complexities, something that’s going to be really hard. But when you show them the way, they get excited and devote their own time and energy to it.”
Now for Clark’s yang: Dancing.
Clark started dancing when she was 3. Ballet, hip-hop, jazz, anything. She majored in dance in college and considered it a possible career before she opted for law school and then, ultimately, pursued her desire to promote sustainability.
“I felt I had something to offer that I couldn’t necessarily do as a dancer,” she says. “Some of [my choice] was fate, and some of it was a conscious decision to make a difference in the world.”
But the self-described “dancer for life” couldn’t abandon her first love. For the last two years, she has danced for a local professional sports team (the team’s safety policy doesn’t allow her to identify the team’s name, but it’s safe to say she’s busiest in late summer and fall). Although the commitment takes up to 30 hours a week, most weeks Clark hardly even notices. “When it’s your passion and it’s something that makes you happy, it doesn’t feel like work,” she says.
The way she sees it, it’s her responsibility to keep both her yin and yang close, because she can’t imagine life without one or the other.
“I perform better and I’m more mentally dexterous when I’m dancing,” Clark says. “I don’t know if it opens different synaptic connections or something, but when my body’s expressing itself through movement, I feel more creative in my professional and personal life.
“I’ve always sought that balance.”
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