Liz Lowe

In just two years after graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business, Lowe is making waves at Adobe in sustainability and helping to lead the way to more diverse and inclusive hiring at the large tech company.

Liz Lowe started as an intern at Adobe while pursuing her MBA at the University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business and has since taken the reigns of the Sustainability and Social Impact team, where she has pushed boundaries and experimented with unique programming. In just two years, Lowe is already making waves at Adobe in sustainability and helping to lead the way to more diverse and inclusive hiring at the large tech company. In 2016, Lowe was awarded GreenBiz’s “30 under 30” recognition for her work in sustainability at Adobe.

Lowe contributed to the recently released “Road to Diversity + Inclusion” (with Tipping Point Community), a how-to guide for creating an inclusive work environment. She exemplifies this through the programs she has created to foster a more diverse workforce at Adobe and allow the current workforce to be more inclusive.

Lowe has been instrumental in experimenting with new programs at Adobe with the goal to increase the diversity of its talent pool. Lowe led her team to design and manage the diversity and inclusion program, offering technical scholarships and apprenticeships to nontraditional candidates as an alternative pipeline to tech careers.

The Adobe Digital Academy is a diversity and inclusion initiative aimed at shortening the pipeline of tech talent through an education partnership with web development immersive programs and a three-month Adobe internship. Together with a colleague from human resources, Lowe has made the Adobe Digital Academy a major success and it is expanding beyond their Bay Area offices. Adobe’s Sustainability + Social Impact team partners with a number of nonprofits in order to reach potential candidates. The typical candidate has a two- or four-year college degree, between two to six years of work experience, and a self-starter mentality.

Adobe can thank Lowe in part for being ahead of the curve on sustainability perks. The software giant draws on a long tradition of greening its buildings and data centers. Over the past year, the maker of Photoshop and Acrobat has gone further, making a 100-percent renewable energy pledge and aligning corporate sustainability strategy with employee engagement.

Through Lowe and her team, Adobe offers incentives for its apartment-renting interns and home-owning managers alike, such as carpooling via the Waze app and kits for apartment energy savings, as well as discounts on electric cars and solar panels. Solar discounts even extend to employees abroad.

Lowe uses positive psychology to inspire behavior change. And the more her co-workers adopt such measures personally, the more they help Adobe drive sustainability forward.