About Navigating Grey
We started this because “trust us, it worked” was never good enough.
Navigating Grey is the company behind SustainImpact Navigator. We build the tools that help organizations prove their social and environmental work is actually landing — not nationally, not on average, but in the specific ZIP codes where people live.
Our mission
Help clients unlock the socioeconomic value of their sustainability and social impact work, measured at the ZIP-code level instead of the national average.
Our vision
A world where impact work is driven by cooperation and real stakeholder engagement — where the people a program is meant to serve have a hand in shaping it.
How we got here
The company was born in the grey.
Navigating Grey started in Charlotte, North Carolina, at the intersection of two generations. Irvine Sloan had spent a career inside corporate sustainability and social impact. His daughter Sanaa, then in high school, had strong opinions about a future she was going to inherit. The two of them kept landing on the same frustration: the people most affected by impact work almost never got a say in how it was measured.
The name came out of that. Solutions to socioeconomic problems are rarely black or white. They live in the grey — the messy middle where experience meets fresh perspective, and where you actually have to do the work of listening before you can claim a result.
So we built a company around that idea, and then a platform to back it up. SustainImpact Navigator is what came of it: a way to collect real evidence from real communities and turn it into something an organization can stand behind.
What we hold to
Four things we don't compromise on.
They started as the letters our founders kept coming back to. They still decide what we build and what we won't.
Innovation
We’d rather build the better way than defend the old one. Most of what we ship started as a problem a client couldn’t solve with a spreadsheet.
Integrity
If the data doesn’t support the claim, we don’t make the claim. Evidence over optimism, every time.
Inclusion
The communities a program serves should help shape how it’s measured. We design for their voice, not around it.
Investment
Impact is a long game. We build for outcomes that hold up years from now, not numbers that look good this quarter.
The founders
The people who started Navigating Grey.
A corporate veteran, a student who wouldn't let the next generation be an afterthought, and the technologist who put it all in one place.
0101 · Co-Founder
Irvine Sloan
Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer
- Strategy
- Corporate impact
- Partnerships
Irvine spent a career inside corporate sustainability and social impact before starting Navigating Grey. He kept running into the same gap: plenty of good intentions, almost no honest way to show what actually changed on the ground.
He started the company in Charlotte with his daughter Sanaa, betting that the people closest to a problem should have a real hand in how its impact gets measured. He sets the direction for both the consulting work and the platform.
0202 · Co-Founder
Sanaa Sloan
Co-Founder & Chief Social Impact Officer
- Community engagement
- Youth voice
- Social impact
Sanaa co-founded Navigating Grey as a high schooler and made one point from day one: the generation that inherits these problems should have a real say in solving them today, not someday.
That conviction shapes how the company thinks about community engagement — designing for the voices of the people a program serves rather than around them.
0303 · Co-Founder
Orlandus Gilmore
Co-Founder & Chief Technology Officer
- Platform
- Data & maps
- Product
Orlandus leads the technology behind SustainImpact Navigator. He’s the reason field evidence, community maps, and census data come together in one tool instead of five.
His focus is making rigorous measurement feel simple — something a field team can pick up and use without a manual or a data scientist on call.
Want to see what we built?
Book a short walkthrough and we'll show you how SustainImpact Navigator turns field evidence into proof you can put in front of a board.
30 minutes · no pressure, no obligation