By Bernardita Valenzuela Reymond, Student in the M.S. in Sustainability Management Program
On the shelves in Wendy Hapgood’s Manhattan apartment are nests collected from KwaZulu-Natal, a province in eastern South Africa. Scattered throughout the space are feathers, animal skulls, and a giraffe tail. The apartment also serves as the international headquarters of Wild Tomorrow, a conservation nonprofit that Hapgood and her husband co-founded, so it occasionally doubles as a warehouse.
Wild Tomorrow was established in 2015 with a modest goal: to provide boots and uniforms for underfunded park rangers in KwaZulu-Natal. A decade later, it has grown into something far more ambitious. The organization is building the Greater Ukuwela Nature Reserve, a wildlife corridor on South Africa's Elephant Coast designed to connect two major protected areas—the MunYaWana Conservancy and the iSimangaliso UNESCO World Heritage Wetland Park—creating more than 880,000 acres of connected space for wildlife.
The land, once earmarked for pineapple farming, now spans more than 4,000 acres of legally protected habitat. It is home to three threatened habitat types under active restoration, and more than 1,200 species have been documented there, including 40 at risk of extinction. Wild Tomorrow has also reintroduced species absent from the land for decades, including zebras, giraffes, and wildebeest. After five land purchases, the corridor is now complete. The next step: drop the fences and let the elephants through.
What makes Wild Tomorrow unusual is not just what it has built, but how it has done it: entirely from a Manhattan apartment, through donor galas and the kind of strategic networking only possible in New York City.
Hapgood, a graduate of Columbia University's M.S. in Sustainability Management program—where she now teaches the course Sustainability Management—splits her time between New York and Zoom calls with rangers thousands of miles away. Before this, she spent a decade in foreign exchange sales at Barclays Capital and Citibank, working across Singapore, Tokyo, and New York City. The pivot wasn't planned. It rarely is. An edited interview with Hapgood follows.
You were born in Australia, but you built a career in banking across Tokyo and New York. How did you end up there?
It was almost entirely accidental. At university in Australia, I pursued parallel degrees in electrical engineering and arts, with a double major in Japanese. When I graduated, I wanted to use my Japanese, so I found a job in Tokyo. I ended up at an IT consulting firm that worked with banks, which is how I landed in finance as a director of sales in foreign exchange. But I was never chasing a career in banking. I was chasing a language. There's an Australian author, Bryce Courtenay, who says that many people climb the ladder of success only to find it was leaning against the wrong wall. That's exactly what happened to me.
In 2011, the Tohoku earthquake and Fukushima nuclear disaster struck. I was in Tokyo when the earthquake hit. I watched the disaster unfold, and I remember being shocked, not just by the event itself, but by how few people around me seemed to care about the environmental consequences. Colleagues would say, “No big deal, nobody died.” And I'm thinking: We poisoned the earth. Nuclear waste is running into the ocean. And everyone's just going to work. I felt complicit. That was the moment I knew I needed to do something else.
You moved to New York in 2011. How did Wild Tomorrow come out of that?
When I met my husband, John, he had been on volunteer trips to South Africa and came back with stories about how under-resourced the rangers protecting wildlife from poachers were—no boots, no uniforms. He wanted to help from New York, but the organization he worked with said they didn't need anyone there. So he and a colleague decided to start their own. We both quit our corporate jobs on the same day, which, looking back, was either very brave or very naive.
A year in, we heard about a piece of land for sale, next to a river that feeds into a UNESCO World Heritage wetland. Two pineapple farmers were ready to buy it and clear it. The land cost the equivalent of $1.3 million—and we had only raised $40,000. But I remember thinking: A million dollars in New York City is a studio apartment.
What would you need to see to feel like this work has been successful?
The fences come down. From the very beginning, our dream has been to create a connected corridor that allows elephants to move all the way through to the UNESCO World Heritage Park. Foot-and-mouth disease, cattle conflicts, politics—it's always something. But the wildlife doesn't care about any of that. They need a connected habitat. That's the non-negotiable.
And beyond the corridor?
I used to think it was about scaling internationally—more land, more projects. I still want that. But I've become increasingly convinced that we also need to bring conservation home. People connect to what they can see and touch. I have this image in my head of a butterfly corridor on Fifth Avenue in the spring, subway stops with flowers, and other ways to connect New Yorkers to something alive. That sounds small. But if people in cities don't feel connected to nature, none of the rest of it is going to work.
About the Program
The Columbia University M.S. in Sustainability Management program offered by the School of Professional Studies in partnership with the Climate School provides students cutting-edge policy and management tools they can use to help public and private organizations and governments address environmental impacts and risks, pollution control, and remediation to achieve sustainability. The program is customized for working professionals and is offered as both a full- and part-time course of study.
