I’m so grateful we can feature your work here, Whitney. It’s so broad and all encompassing; how do you introduce yourself when you’re meeting smoeone new?

I'm Whitney, and I like to introduce myself as a world builder. Practically, I'm a strategist working at the intersection of climate, art, culture and community. I'm a mother. And I'm a strategic designer, so I bring design thinking into the work.

I consider myself a world builder, too, and it’s something I’ve always appreciated about watching your work from afar. How did you realize that’s such a critical component of your career?

Growing up, I was always an expansive thinker, challenging authority, questioning our position in the universe. I was raised Buddhist, so I had this understanding of the oneness of people and the planet, which is the foundation of my focus in sustainability, but also a brief introduction to quantum physics and the ways we can create our realities.

I grew up in the Midwest in a predominantly Black community and was expected to achieve, especially to change generational patterns of financial scarcity. I left the west side of Dayton, Ohio for boarding school on a full tuition scholarship, and became acutely aware of the juxtaposition between the two environments. That put a chip on my shoulder, which I ended up nurturing to create the career I live now.

I started asking more questions. Why does injustice exist? Why was slavery even a thing? Buddhism provided some context, but I still had many more questions. I'm largely guided by curiosity. That's how I ended up in the legal field. I always loved writing and weaving stories together into something cohesive. This is probably also why I love reality TV. It's sociology 101.

I graduated law school during the recession. Jobs were super, super scarce, and I couldn't land one. I got a job as a design associate at a mid-century modern furniture store and learned furniture-making, textiles, color coordination, patterns. A real crash course in design. At the same time, I started supporting the artists in my life. I was raised by one. I married (and divorced) one. I consider myself one. They just didn't understand the legalese, and I knew how to interpret contracts. That's how I started my own firm. I ran it for 10 years and sunset it three years ago.

My life was structured so differently from my clients'. They'd go on residencies. I had never heard of a residency! Years later I started attending them myself. The firm, Sustainable Brooklyn, which I started with Dominique Drakeford, teaching, working in museums, all of it became fodder for when I decided to do something out of the box, because I never felt comfortable in any boxes. Living in those in-between spaces, translating between different worlds for people, has required every single minute and millisecond of my life up until now.

Tell me about community and how it's shaped the way you work.

My relationship to community was, at one point, based in trauma, this feeling like I never really fit in anywhere. Community has also been a balm, because I was constantly surrounded by it growing up. My mom used to host Buddhist meetings in our home. I learned that community requires organization, infrastructure, care, and the killing of the ego. I sometimes call community a verb because it's something I do.

It's shown up in the ways I provide space. I used to teach free workshops on sustainability and fashion with Sustainable Brooklyn, always meant to take knowledge from the ivory tower and give it to the people. The latest iteration is Sustaining Community, an event series I started in 2024 to address the crises happening hyper-locally, especially for artists: affordability, gentrification, lack of resources, burnout.

I'd pair an artist with someone in their community who's helped them sustain themselves. We always gave out groceries. I did those for eight months, then switched to a fund. Through my newsletter, Conditions, each subscription contributes to the Sustaining Community Fund, a way to crowdsource my salary, because I can't keep doing this work for free, and to support artists in my life who need it.

You also started the Baby Mama Supper Club!!!

I'm a recent single mama as of 2022. A large portion of my friend group is also single mothers, so I had people to lean on. But we wanted to get more organized about it. So I started hosting potlucks in my apartment, each one with an agenda item to discuss. Our kids would be running around. It organically formed into the Baby Mama Supper Club. We support each other through skillshares, through financial support, sometimes we'll just cook big meals so someone doesn't have to cook on a Friday.

You mentioned world building was your work about three years into motherhood. What shifted during that time?

That was around 2023. Before that I was racking my brain, going through depressive episodes, trying to figure out what my lane was. For much of my life I was focused on surviving. Now, projects are born from me. I'm no longer in somatic survival mode, though financially, there is a lot of room for improvement.

I was in so many transitions all at once, and around the time my kid was three my brain started to function again semi-normally. I could reflect on my past and what my legacy would be. I was becoming more comfortable with surrendering to the unknown, even with this massive responsibility of raising a human. I always have a plan, but I was kind of like, let me take my hand off the steering wheel and let my faith guide me.

I am so vast, and I'm a universe unto myself. I've outgrown this dream. It's like looking back at myself and being like, baby girl, there's so, so, so much more ahead of you. That was the first time I could see a clear vision of myself, and of what kinds of worlds I was capable of building.

What does the future look like, smell like, feel like to you?

Around the height of the pandemic, I went through a long period of being unable to envision the future. I made an art piece about it, a website called In the Future, where I asked people to fill in the blank: "In the future, Black people are ___." That became a whole movement. Reading the responses helped me ground myself in, okay, there's still hope.

I'm a firm believer in timeline jumping. So the future I see smells like cardamom. Sweet and spicy, nourishing, satiating. It's also really messy and complicated, but there's less fear around that messiness.

I see so many kids who are healthy and thriving, and nuclear families sort of not really being a thing, more living in a communal and respectful way. An ideal future for me is dripping with empathy, and an eradication of anti-Black racism, which is going to be really hard. But that's the future I want.

What do you want people to know about, and act on?

I want to plug my tool Polibot.co. It's a real-time environmental regulation tracker for redlined communities. It alerts subscribers to regulations introduced or passed at the federal, state and local level, and how those will impact their communities. Right now I'm only looking at water and air quality, but there's a need to focus on hyper-local issues in Brooklyn too: permits, deed theft, all the regulations that allow the things that affect our habitability to manifest. I launched the MVP in December, and I'm raising $60,000 to pilot it in NYC. I'm not approaching this like a startup founder spending 40 hours a day. But I am happy with how it's progressing.

The McGuire Consulting Group continues to consult. Most of my clients are arts institutions or sustainable fashion brands, and I help them solve massive problems affecting their internal cultures and funding streams. We also host Climate + Art + Philanthropy lunches quarterly to call in the failure of philanthropy in closing the gaps between funding apparatuses and the communities already doing the work. We're coming up on our year anniversary this September during NYC Climate Week 2026. They're systems interventions I design to get people from different sectors talking about how art and climate support each other.

What's bringing you joy right now?

I am bringing me joy. I just turned 40. Things are still weird in life, but I'm really proud of myself for everything that I've been able to do and everything that's made me who I am. And my kid brings me joy. He's so freaking funny. Theres never a dull moment. He's eight. I'm getting glimpses of what he's going to be like as a preteen, but he's so honest, so aware of who he is. I'm just nurturing whatever's going on right now.

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Whitney McGuire, Esq. helps organizations and artists rethink their impact on people and the planet. A lawyer, strategist, educator, and systems designer working at the intersection of culture, climate, and equity, she brings more than a decade of experience transforming how communities and institutions imagine sustainability as a practice of care, justice, and cultural preservation.

As the Founder and Managing Partner of The McGuire Consulting Group, Whitney guides museums, foundations, and mission-driven organizations through change — building strategies that center community, equity, and environmental accountability. Her work has shaped initiatives with The Guggenheim, The Getty, Christie's, The Kitchen, and Custom Collaborative. 

Trained as an attorney and informed by her experience as a cultural worker and professor at Parsons School of Design, Whitney bridges legal, ecological, and creative systems to help organizations move from intention to transformation.