Mark Stenftenagel is CEO of Whitney Inc., an award-winning design and architecture firm based in Chicago that he founded 39 years ago. He is also CEO of Q Design, a product design consultancy he founded in 1994. 

Mark has been a concerned climate activist for several decades. He was co-founder of the Corporate Climate Alliance and President of MARTRA, the Mesoamerican Ridge-to Reef Alliance. He is a member of E2, Environmental Entrepreneurs, and the Illinois Green Alliance. 

He sits on the advisory boards of interior design departments at Southern Illinois University and Illinois State University, and has served for nearly 40 years on the board of directors at Onward Neighborhood House in Chicago. 

Mark’s passion for environmental preservation has been born out of global travel to coastal biodiversity meccas far from his Midwestern roots, and was inspired by the teachings of R. Buckminster Fuller, Alexander Von Humboldt, Aldo Leopold, and Paul Hawken. He is committed to helping to solve the climate crisis from the perspective of a design problem rooted in the need for conservation.