Case Study: MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative achieves streamlined, repeatable Earth Day and event planning with Asana

How MIT’s Environmental Solutions Initiative plans Earth Day events with Asana

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Environmental Solutions Initiative (ESI) is a small, interdisciplinary team that mobilizes students, faculty, and staff to advance people‑centric, planet‑positive solutions through education, research, and convening. With just three full‑time staff and two interns, ESI must plan 20–25 events a year—plus grants, fellowships, newsletters, and a new undergraduate minor—creating a coordination challenge across many stakeholders and recurring programs like Earth Day.

ESI solved this by running each event as an Asana project with clear sections, assignees, due dates, custom status fields, and reusable templates; they also archive past projects and track meeting agendas in Asana. The result is faster, more consistent event planning, better team visibility and collaboration, and easier reuse of past work—helping ESI reliably produce multiple Earth Day events and ongoing programming without reinventing the process each year.

MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative

Hannah Loomis

Senior Program Assistant