Celebrating Alumni Stories: James Souder ’09

Step 1: Buy a bike. Step 2: Join a choir. Step 3: Get to work. Thanks to already-ample experience in engaging with new contexts, James Souder ‘09 knew the best way to find home in Amsterdam six years ago was to jump right in.

For Souder, who has three older sisters who also attended EMS, jumping right in was nothing new. In high school, he was involved in “a bit of everything,” from orchestra and jazz band to Touring Choir and Chamber Choir, from student council to cross country and track. He recalls days when, between morning Mandarin classes and evening musical rehearsals, he spent close to sixteen hours at the school.

In his move up the hill to Eastern Mennonite University (EMU), Souder followed the same pattern, involving himself in just about anything and everything he found interesting. But here, his passion for something a bit more focused began to take root. Through his major in Environmental and Social Sustainability, Souder explored how to think about meeting people’s needs without exceeding environmental limits – a “wicked problem” with complicated answers. From collecting dripping water from his bathtub at home after an inspiring EMS Discovery trip, to beginning a food recovery and distribution program at the EMU cafeteria, he had found a direction for his boundless energy: What do we do with waste?

Professional Life – Between Social and Technical

After spending a year in Pittsburgh, Souder moved to Washington, D.C. to work with Food Recovery Network, helping students at colleges across the country do the same thing he had done at EMU: start programs to recover surplus food and donate it. He then traveled to Burkina Faso with Mennonite Central Committee’s year-long SALT program, using his creative photography skills to document practices of farmers dealing with a changing climate.

Now deep in the social side of environmental issues, Souder began to feel that without technical knowledge and systems-thinking, some of the solutions he had worked on were simply “bandaids.” This led him to Yale University to study industrial ecology and green design – a degree focused on measuring impacts of and redesigning systems and material flows.

Souder’s newly-earned expertise in the ins and outs of material production got him excited about rethinking systems. In 2018, he was hired by Metabolic, a project-based environmental consulting company in Amsterdam that works to create sustainable systems by working with governments and manufacturers. Souder quickly became a senior consultant, responsible for encouraging circular systems, in which early stages of the production of material goods value “higher R strategies.” Different from end-of-life R strategies like recycling – which are still of major importance – these higher strategies retain and recapture value at many points during the product’s entire lifecycle. These strategies include regenerating resources used in products, rethinking product design, and repurposing parts of the product during its use. “A circular product can only exist in a properly functioning circular system,” Souder says.

Finding Balance

But while Souder felt his consulting work was important, he also began to recognize that he was caught up in a “go, go, go, mentality…again.” By taking on too much, including through challenging times during the COVID-19 pandemic, he experienced burnout to the point where he felt his body shutting down. Souder recalls, “It was a wake-up moment. I’d been going so fast for so many years. My body was telling me, ‘You’re doing too much. You need to rest.’” This led him to reconsider something that had before felt so natural: What does it mean to “jump right in”?

Thankfully, the Netherlands takes stress-induced illness seriously and invests in burnout recovery programs. Through this support, Souder found time to reflect, “touch base” with his body, and “communicate needs and boundaries.” Souder says that, like the system of material production, we as humans only have a certain amount of energy. He adds, “We need to be in tune with what gives us energy, what takes our energy, and how we can best use our gifts and skills to contribute in a positive way to society.”

So for the last year and a half, Souder has found himself in his own circular process, “constantly evaluating” how he feels about his pace of life and work, and how he can best use his strengths. A change in both personal style and work responsibilities reflects this growth. Souder now sports long curly locks and a thick, dark beard – for him, an outward sign that he is doing work on the inside. He has also transitioned into strategic communications at Metabolic, which means clarifying for broader audiences the goals and visions Metabolic stands for. Recently, he helped to build a storyline to visualize what the company believes a properly functioning circular system should look like. His current work involves overlaying the company’s past and current projects on this model to show the effectiveness of circular systems in practice.

Back to the “Why”

Now, it is Souder’s goal to maintain this new-found balance between, on one hand, the excitement of passions and wanting to be involved, and on the other, taking care of himself. He reflects, “I’ve been focusing on doing things for me, not what I think others want me to do, and really blossoming and growing in new directions.” This mindfulness mirrors that which he is calling for from industry: “How are we making choices?” he asks. “From a grounded place or a trying-to-keep-up-with-things place?”

Souder hopes to continue to ease himself back into the social side of his work as Communications Lead for the Industries Consulting division at Metabolic. By focusing on the technical elements of production, he feels the human element has been missing from his work and hopes to engage his creativity and people-connecting skills. He recognizes, after all, that experiences which have connected him with people of different walks of life – such as an EMS Touring Choir trip to Eastern Europe, his work with international students at EMU’s Summer Peacebuilding Institute, and his EMU cross-cultural experience to the Middle East – are a significant part of his journey. He hopes to continue to find ways to “strengthen bonds between people at a local scale” while remembering a focus he appreciated about his education at EMS: “We are global citizens and part of something bigger.”

Speaking of circular systems, Souder says his love of music – nurtured and grown at EMS – has been one thing that has kept him going and lifted his spirits. He’s even had a chance to play his soprano saxophone, which was purchased his senior year of university, with his choir. “It has sort of come full-circle,” he says with a smile.