Volta CEO Martha Casey will step down this month after almost two years in the role, rejoining former collaborator Richard Florizone at the International Institute for Sustainable Development, or IISD, as Vice-President of Operations and Organizational Transformation.

Casey previously served as Florizone’s chief of staff when he was president of Dalhousie University. There, she was involved in the expansion of the school’s startup support programs, with Florizone backing the creation of a roster of initiatives focused on commercializing innovation via Dal Innovates.

Her new role at the IISD is the result of conversations she had with Florizone about their respective post-Dalhousie careers, in which he suggested she speak with the institute’s search committee.

“They've a very, very strong operational team,” said Casey of the IISD in an interview. “People (there) really are masters in their field.

“So the idea was … have somebody come in and sort of support all of those pieces to work together more cohesively.”

Florizone is in the process of growing the IISD’s staff by about 30 percent, and Casey said her experience scaling up special projects at Dalhousie and as a bureaucrat in Michael Bloomberg’s New York City mayoral administration makes her well-positioned to help lead the expansion charge.

“When I was working in the last job I had in New York, I was the change management lead for a new enterprise system that was coming across multiple agencies,” said Casey.

"The agency where I was working was experiencing some growth. We were responsible for hiring and implementing the paid sick leave law in New York, which meant bringing on many new staff, figuring out what those roles were going to be and integrating that.”

She also stressed that she is leaving Volta in great shape. "This is an exciting time for Volta -- we’ve never been in a stronger place," she said. "We have an outstanding team, our future is stable, and we’ve just concluded strategy work."

Volta, which originated in 2013, provides office space as well as incubator and accelerator programs for startups. Casey was elevated to CEO in the spring of 2020, after a two-year stint as COO. She has shepherded the organization through a pivot to a hybrid business model that includes a mix of virtual and in-person services.

When COVID-19 arrived in Nova Scotia and temporarily scuppered Volta’s founding premise of using shared office space to create networking opportunities, Casey’s team took much of its program offerings digital, including the Volta Cohort accelerator and pitch competitions.

The team also began holding weekly meetings with startup founders to seek feedback about what types of support entrepreneurs most needed.

A key takeaway from the meetings, Casey said in October, was that founders needed more personalized guidance than Volta’s standardized incubator offering could provide.

“What we found was that … rather than prescriptive programming, we needed to be very focused on getting founders the support they need when they need it,” she said.

Now, Volta is is resuming in-person programming for its residency program, but will continue to also offer its services online to startups headquartered in Atlantic Canada.

"Seeing those companies connect and the engagement they have with one another, it was really inspiring," said Casey of Volta's in-person networking event last week -- the first since the beginning of the pandemic. It included several companies in the virtual residency program. "This is how it's supposed to work."

The IISD, meanwhile, is a think tank founded in 1990 with the stated aim of informing international policy on sustainable development, which is a framework for organizational and governmental decision-making. It seeks to balance economic growth with environmental protection and social responsibility.

The institute, which has offices in Winnipeg, Ottawa, Toronto and Switzerland, has in recent years focused its efforts on “accelerating the global transition to fair economies, clean water and a stable climate.” Florizone was appointed president and CEO in Jan. 2020.