I was sitting in my classroom when I heard the principal call my name through the speakers.
He asked me to come to his office.
My first thought was, “What have I done?”
I still remember the nervous walk from the classroom, waiting outside his door before his assistant showed me in. Instead of a reprimand, he handed me an exclusive pen and told me I was the best secretary the school council had ever had at my age. I was eleven years old. He encouraged me to continue engaging in extracurricular work and said he saw something in me worth nurturing.
That moment stayed with me. It was all it took to set something in motion.
From early on, I knew I wanted to contribute to something larger than myself. It may sound like a cliché, but it has always been my motivation. I got my first paid job at fourteen at a small motel and restaurant in Sweden’s smallest city, Åmål. I moved from home at sixteen and couldn’t wait to begin university life.
I grew up with big ambitions. In upper secondary school, I said I wanted to become Minister of Foreign Affairs – though I knew politics wasn’t my path. A mentor suggested diplomacy instead, and encouraged me to aim high: internships at the United Nations, international studies, long horizons. I worked toward that goal for seven years, eventually becoming an intern at the UN Headquarters in New York and later a fellow at the World Food Programme in Rome, while completing my Master’s degree in Global Studies at the University of Gothenburg.
During that time, I had the opportunity to meet former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, a moment that symbolized something deeper for me: proximity to power, responsibility, and the human consequences of decisions made far from everyday life.
For seven years after that, I served as Secretary General of the Swedish Association for Responsible Consumption (Medveten Konsumtion). I never became a diplomat, or Minister of Foreign Affairs, but I found a role where diplomacy, systems thinking, communication and responsibility met. Most importantly, I found the red thread. Or perhaps more accurately: the circle.
Through consumption – through what we choose, support and normalize – we affect human rights, women’s rights, children’s rights, growth, sustainable development and the living planet itself. Sustainability was never abstract to me. It was deeply human.
In 2018, I became co-founder of Circular Monday. What began as a campaign grew, through collaboration, volunteer power and shared belief, into the world’s largest global movement for circular consumption, active in over 58 countries and reaching more than 100 million people worldwide in 2025. When my co-founder Henning Gillberg passed away in 2022, carrying the campaign forward became both a responsibility and a form of devotion.
Alongside this, I co-founded ClimateHero, an impact start-up helping individuals and organizations understand and reduce their climate footprint. From 2023 onward, ClimateHero carried Circular Monday globally, providing structure and reach during a critical phase of growth. In 2026, I concluded my operational role while remaining a co-founder in ClimateHero – choosing alignment over momentum, and long-term stewardship over constant acceleration.
Today, at 35, I can see something clearly that I couldn’t name when I was younger.
All along, my work has been about sustainability, not only of systems and resources, but of people.
I have always been the person others turn to in moments of transition, grief, or uncertainty. I hear what isn’t being said. I help people reconnect to meaning, direction, their truth and self-trust. Long before I had language for it, I was holding space – as a friend, a mentor, a guide.
This is where my work is now expanding.
Alongside my public work in sustainability, leadership and circularity, I am creating space for voice, writing, and deeper forms of dialogue and mentorship. I am currently working on a book that gives language to the inner life behind a visible career – shaped by grief, periods of deep depression, life with chronic pain, and what unfolds behind closed doors while continuing to build and lead. I am stepping into a chapter where inner and outer sustainability are no longer separate conversations, but the same one.
This next phase lives somewhere I will launch soon.
It is not a departure from what I’ve built – it is a continuation.
The work has always been about wholeness.
I’m simply allowing myself to be all of it now.
The years that shaped the work before I could name it.
