
Our Climate Journey with Lyn McCullen

“To me, sustainability means making sure the next generation can enjoy our natural resources.”
Lyn McCullen
Senior Director, Proposals
Lyn joined Zum in 2023 as the Senior Director leading the Proposal Team. She works to expand Zum’s partnerships and reach. By helping Zūm grow, she also increases the impact of its sustainability efforts, and helps introduce our sustainability options to new school districts.
Lyn loves spending time with her family outdoors, including hiking in Valley Forge National Park with her husband Mike, walking along the beach in St. Augustine with her daughter Ainsely, and cheering on her son Shane as he plays disc golf for the Clemson Tigers and Discmania. She also enjoys her family’s annual trip to Smith Mountain Lake (near Zum’s new Roanoke City yard).
At Zum, we’re revolutionizing student transportation in order to build a green, sustainable future. What does sustainability mean to you?
To me, sustainability means making sure the next generation can enjoy our natural resources.
My children love being outside. Nature, the outdoors, all of it. We’ve had so much fun and made so many wonderful memories: from swimming in the Atlantic Ocean down the Jersey Shore, to exploring Sabino Canyon in Arizona, to playing disc golf in Smugglers Notch Vermont. I want to continue doing this with them, and for them to do the same with their children.
So we take this sort of thing seriously in our house. As part of one of my daughter’s Girl Scout projects, we recycled sneakers. I’ve made “plarn”—yarn out of plastic bags—which our township repurposed into mats for the unhoused in Philadelphia. In fact, our entire township—Easttown, outside Villanova in Pennsylvania—did away with plastic bags, so we all use bags made of other materials.
When my son and I play disc golf outside, we live by the motto “full hands in, full hands out.” We always try to pick up trash and leave the courses better than we found them.
It’s small, but that’s sustainability in our family.
Climate change is the single greatest threat to our way of life, but it can sometimes feel abstract, far away, a problem for another time. How has climate change affected you personally?
I’ve lived in Easttown for over twenty years. Historically, the weather here has been predictable and relatively mild. In the past few years, though, we’ve experienced large swings in temperature and dramatic increases in the severity of weather events.
When it is cold, it’s not just cold, it’s bitter. When it’s warm, it’s stifling hot. Instead of several small snow storms throughout the winter, we get a handful of large snow falls, blanketing the area in feets of snow. Or worse, we can go a whole winter without any snow at all. During the pandemic, when we were outside more, I started noticing that everything is more extreme—freezing winters and baking summers, with much shorter spring and fall seasons.
I also notice climate change in our beaches, along the Jersey Shore. The erosion of the dunes is more prominent than ever. The shoreline is receding, houses are falling into the ocean, there’s less beach to enjoy.
The degradation from climate change is everywhere, if you stop and look for it.
What can Zum do to be a leader in sustainability, to spearhead the charge in the fight against climate change?
At Zum, we educate, recognize, and support educators about climate. It’s something we can continue doing.
Each time we submit an RFP to a school district, we’re including facts about transportation, including how buses affect air quality and student health. Electric vehicles are new, so if we’re including EVs in a proposal, we’re doing a lot of educating there. Some of that involves providing details about how EVs perform in cold weather—many school districts need to get kids to and from school during snowy winter months.
We then try to recognize the innovators within school districts who step up to the plate and who are ready for change. Oakland Unified School District in particular has been an exceptional partner, leading the charge of an all-EV bus fleet, and we celebrate their leadership every chance we get.
Finally, we support the school administrators in the districts we serve, by providing them with facts and research to support the changes they are making to their student transportation.
It’s not about sales so much as being a climate thought leader—and our leadership here at Zum has really stepped up.