3p Contributor: Deborah Fleischer
Recent Articles
Speed Dating Meets Green Business at Green America’s Conference
By Deborah Fleischer, Green Impact
Green America’s Green Business Conference was the yenta of the green business world yesterday when it hosted its Product Expo: Marketplace and Community Connections. Participants were invited to set up a business display at this product expo that was modeled after the ever so popular speed dating concept.
The idea last night was to get all the conference attendees networking and doing business with each other. One of my complaints about conferences is that they don’t do enough to promote networking and Green America has done a great job at this conference on integrating creative ways to encourage us to meet each other.
At a traditional speed dating event, you spend only three minutes speaking to a potential love interest and then move on. If there is mutual interest, you follow-up on your own after the event. While the networking last night was a bit less structured, we were encouraged to circulate and meet as many businesses as possible.
Since Scott Cooney has been doing a great job of highlighting some of the sessions, I thought I would focus on a few of the businesses that made it onto my final dance card last night.
Transit and Trails: Connecting People to Nature on Public Transit
Don’t own a car, but want to get out to one of the Bay Area’s hundreds of parks and trails? Or perhaps, you are trying to reduce your carbon footprint and wondering how to get to your favorite hike without using your car?
Transit and Trails is a new resource for outdoor enthusiasts who want to leave their cars behind and easily get information on how to take the bus (or ferry) to reach Bay Area hiking trails and campgrounds.
A project of the Bay Area Open Space Council (BAOSC), the new interactive website identifies hundreds of trailheads and 150 campgrounds to explore across the Bay Area’s 1.2 million acres of preserved lands. Just enter your starting location, and roughly how far you want to venture, and the site suggests possible hikes and featured trips. Once you decide where you want to go, it connects with the Metropolitan Transportation Commission’s 511 Transit Trip Planner to provide a detailed trip itinerary, complete with a map, transit times, fares and walking directions to and from the transit stop.
Employee Engagement: AngelPoints and Saatchi S Launch New PSP Tool
As part of a corporate sustainability strategy, there is a growing trend to engage employees on multiple levels, both at work and at home. More and more companies are providing their employees advice and tips on how to green their personal lives. But a key challenge is how to measure and track the benefits of these programs.
AngelPoints, a provider of enterprise software solutions for employee engagement, has recently partnered with Saatchi & Saatchi S, the sustainability strategy firm that helped Wal-Mart create their Personal Sustainability Project (PSP) program, to create a new web-based platform to help make it easier to engage employees in sustainability and to track their progress.
As reported on CSRwire, “The newly launched PSP platform enables employees to chart individual and collective progress on a secure and reliable site easily accessed through a company’s intranet.”
The theory is if you can get employees engaged and excited about being greener in their personal lives, they will bring this excitement and energy to their jobs as well.
BSR 2009: Top Strategies for Getting Employees Behind Sustainability
At BSR 2009 last week, a missing piece on the agenda was employee engagement. Yet, at the session on Internal Communications: Making the Case for CSR’s Value, all of the speakers acknowledged the challenge of getting both employees and senior management behind sustainability.
The panel included Christopher Corpuel, Vice President, Sustainability at Hilton Hotels, Silvia Garrigo, Manager of Global Issues and Policy at Chevron and Kevin Moss, Head of Corporate Social Responsibility at BT Americas Inc. The session, moderated by Eric Olson, Senior Vice President, at BSR, was formatted to allow for deeper dialogue and discussion–much appreciated by everyone!
Day 1 at the BSR Conference: Reset Economy. Reset World.
By Deborah Fleischer, Green Impact
After a weekend at Bioneers, with luminaries such as Michael Pollan and Joanna Macy, yesterday I headed to the Hyatt in San Francisco for BSR’s conference: Reset Economy. Reset World: Delivering Business Value by Thinking Big and Embracing Long-Term Sustainability Trends.
BSR works with a global network of more than 250 member companies to develop sustainable business strategies and solutions through consulting, research and cross-sector collaboration. Upon entering, the sea of black suits, high heels and ties reminded me I was no longer hanging out with activists and social change professionals.
Overall, the attendees I met were sustainability professionals at the conference to network (some were skipping the sessions all together), while others were hungry to learn about best practices and new sustainability tools.
Bioneers: Morph or Die–The Transformation of Journalism and Media
By Deborah Fleischer, Green Impact
I have to say I’m chuckling at myself this morning. I was a bit of a Bioneers consumer yesterday. As I ponder what highlights from Bioneers would be of most interest to Triple Pundit readers, I am listening to the new world beat CD I purchased from Sound Spaces, after trying a few drop of a healing plant-based tonic made by Al-kemi.
Morph or Die–The Transformation of Journalism and Media
One of my favorite sessions, called “Morph or Die–The Transformation of Journalism and Media,” was hosted by Mother Jones and its publisher Jay Harris. The panel included Annie Leonard, the creator of Story of Stuff, Ken Rother from TreeHugger and Josh Silver of Free Press, a media reform organization.
The gist of the session wasn’t new news–we are living through a fast moving transformation of how we receive our news. But the session was lively and had a few interesting takeaways:
Michael Pollan at Bioneers: How Much Oil Are We Eating?
By Deborah Fleischer, Green Impact
The 20th Bioneers, a three day conference celebrating breakthrough sustainability solutions, kicked off on Friday in Marin. The agenda is chock full of speakers on a wide range of topics, from the arts, indigenous knowledge and restoring our ecosystems to youth and women’s leadership.
I was excited to hear Michael Pollan speak, a leading critic of our industrial food system and author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and The Botany of Desire (you can listen to his talk here). For those of you who aren’t attending, you can catch some of the keynotes via live webcast.
How A Sustainability “Change Agent” Workshop Works
By Deborah Fleischer, Green Impact
Ever since I studied adaptive leadership with Ronald Heifetz at Harvard, I have been interested in the intersection between organizational change, systems theory and sustainability issues. Many sustainability professionals seem to lack an understanding of what it takes to create enduring, lasting change within an organization or system. As illustrated with the recent departure of Van Jones from the White House, a change agent needs a strategic understanding of how to navigate the dangers of leading change without getting scapegoated or sidelined.
I recently learned that Sustainable Silicon Valley (SSV) is offering a two-day Sustainability Change Agent Training with Alan AtKisson, November 16th and 17th. I’m excited that I will have the chance to attend (I will be attending to cover the event for Triple Pundit).
I realize many of us have “workshop-itis” these days after attending a few too many workshops and conferences. But I feel this topic has not been well covered at past green trainings. And Sustainable Silicon Valley is offering Triple Pundit readers a discount of $100 off the registration fee (applies only to SSV partner and non-partner rates). Go to the registration page and use the code “triplepundit” when registering.
Creating Change: The Fostering Sustainable Behavior Workshop
By Deborah Fleischer, Green Impact
We all know that a key to creating a greener future is to foster more sustainable behavior at work and in our lives. Be it a green team working to increase recycling rates or reduce paper waste or a corporate sustainability officer working to reduce a carbon footprint, a key challenge is how to encourage changes in our decisions and actions. But we also know that change is not always easy to foster.
To date, most programs to achieve green changes have relied upon disseminating information. Research demonstrates, however, that simply providing information has little or no effect on what individuals or businesses do. But if not ads, brochures or booklets, then what?
Over the last two decades a new approach, community-based social marketing, has emerged as an effective alternative for promoting sustainable behavior.
Armageddon Energy: Taking the Pain Out of Home Solar Systems
By Deborah Fleischer, Green Impact
When you think of installing a solar system on your home, what is the first thought that comes to mind? It will cost too much? It will be complicated to install? Or perhaps, you like the idea, but think solar panels are ugly?
A new start-up Armageddon Energy is working to remove these barriers and bring to market a “plug and play,” modular solar system that is visually appealing, smaller and cheaper than a standard home system and will possibly do for the home solar industry what Ikea did for home furnishings.
The business model? Make it easy, accessible and affordable to sell small home solar system to the masses in a “big box” retail setting.
One of the most promising start-ups to watch
While the name, which alludes to the final battle between the forces of good and evil, has been a bit more controversial then CEO Mark Goldman expected, the company was named one of the five most promising start-ups to watch at the Clean Tech Open by Fast Company.
Three Tips for Engaging Employees in Sustainability
Employee engagement is a growing strategy for driving performance and building competitive advantage for companies with a commitment to sustainability.
“The engaged workforce will find more opportunities to get lean and identify more opportunities to innovate and create products and services that lower customers’ environmental impacts. All of this work will improve the top and bottom lines,” comments sustainable business expert Andrew Winston, in his recent book Green Recovery.
Based on his book, and some of the other recent literature available, I offer the following three tips for engaging employees in sustainability:
- Look at the big picture and identify your greatest impacts across the value chain;
- Involve staff in sustainability on multiple levels, both at work and at home; and
- Integrate sustainability into operations and everyday decisions on products throughout their life cycle.
Catalyzing your employees to integrate sustainability into both their lives and work decisions can be a low-cost strategy for saving money, driving innovation and keeping employees happy.
Planet Metrics: Helping Companies Reduce Their Risk from Embedded Carbon and Energy
By Deborah Fleischer, Green Impact
Planet Metrics is a relatively new start-up with a solution to help corporations model and analyze the life cycle of carbon emissions and energy use throughout their entire supply chain, from cradle to grave. Fast Company covered the start-up in June and called their Rapid Carbon Modeling “a potentially powerful tool.”
What makes Planet Metrics stand out from the crowd of carbon management tools? For one thing, they secured $2.3 million in Series A funding from angel investors and Draper Fisher Jurvetson about nine months ago. They also are working with several large clients, including Method, an environmentally-friendly cleaning product company, a large Canadian retailer and an automobile manufacturer.
The pricing of the software is not public. There is an upfront fee in addition to an annual subscription fee for continued access to the software. They are targeting larger retail, manufacturing and consumer packaged goods companies with complex supply chains, committed to getting started on addressing Scope 3, indirect emissions.
Green Jobs Training: Emerging Opportunities To Leverage Stimulus Dollars
A centerpiece of the stimulus package is an effort to put 3 and 4 million people back to work over the next two years.
The site Recovery.gov includes a map of the U.S. with the estimated jobs expected under the Recovery Act superimposed over each state. California leads with 396,000 anticipated jobs, while North Dakota and Vermont expect the least job growth with 8,000 each.
I’v been curious to better understand who is leading the charge on training the workforce for the wave of new green jobs we are expecting. Are companies taking the lead? Federal agencies or state governments? It seems to be a bit of a chicken and egg scenario. If you deploy training programs without partnering with business, you will have a trained workforce, but no jobs. And if you create the jobs, but neglect workforce development, critical shortage of specialists in growing professions could occur.
According to the National Renewable Energy Lab, the major barriers to a more rapid adoption of renewable energy and energy efficiency in America are insufficient skills and training.
SOCAP Impact Management Workshop: Three Key Take Home Messages
The Social Venture Technology Group (SVT) hosted an Impact Management Workshop on Tuesday as part of the SOCAP conference. The sold out workshop was well attended by a mix of foundation program officers, social entrepreneurs, consultants and academics.
It’s easy to know if you are doing good, but how do you know if you are doing well? This question was a key challenge for the morning session.
The gist of the workshop was a methodology for identifying key indicators to track and measure to help organizations ultimately communicate their value in 5 key areas: financial, social, environmental, operational and economic.
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