Perspectives · A Letter to Our Community

To the GPM-bs, With Love

To everyone who has ever carried the GPM-b,

In 2013, we bestowed the first one. I still remember what it felt like to put a credential into the world and ask people to trust it. You trusted it. You studied, you sat the exam, and you carried what you learned back to your projects, your teams, and your organizations.

In all the years since, I have read almost every piece of feedback this program has ever received. Not once has anyone told me it wasn't worth it. I want you to sit with that for a moment, because it is rare, and it belongs to you as much as it belongs to us.

I have been thinking about the caterpillar and the butterfly, and about how badly we usually tell that story. We talk as if the butterfly replaces the caterpillar, as if one is the finished version and the other was only a rough start. That is not how it works. The caterpillar does the essential work. It feeds, it grows, and it builds the body that everything else depends on. Without that patient, unglamorous effort, there is nothing to transform. You have been that work. You brought sustainability into rooms where it was not welcome, and onto projects that had never once accounted for it.

Then the world around us kept changing. We moved from the green movement, to sustainability, to regeneration. Each shift asked more of us than the one before. The credential had to grow to match what the field now demands, so it entered its own chrysalis.

Tomorrow it emerges as the CSPP, the Certified Sustainable Project Professional. Here is what matters most, and I need you to hear it clearly. The butterfly is the same life as the caterpillar, reorganized for what comes next. Scientists have shown that a butterfly can still remember what it learned as a caterpillar.

The CSPP does not leave you behind. You are the reason it exists.

Our purpose has never changed. We are here to make projects more resilient, and to elevate the world we hand to the people who come after us. That was true the day you earned your GPM-b, and it is just as true as you carry the CSPP forward.

The First to Carry It

Before I close, I want to name the very first of you. In 2013, twenty-five people earned this credential before there was any proof it would matter. They said yes first, and everything that has happened since stands on what they began. 

Thank you for trusting it in 2013, and in every year since. The wings were always yours. And now they belong to all of us.

Tomorrow the chrysalis opens — and what happens next was never mine to hand you, or yours alone to carry. To everyone who held the GPM-b, to everyone earning the CSPP, and to everyone still to come: the work of making projects more resilient, and of regenerating the world we leave to those after us, is up to all of us now. We built the body. Now we fly — together.

With love and gratitude,

Joel