Green Options

That once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that both warms one’s heart and instills a swarm of nervous stomach butterflies came about for me last week:  giving a commencement address at my old high school, Glenbrook South in Glenview, Illinois. 

While it ranked an honor to receive the distinguished alum award, the five-minute speech proffering advice for the 2009 graduating class proved to be a unique challenge for me, requiring me to think about and process the “Lisa Kivirist” from 1985 when I graduated, when the only “green” I knew was the one in the padded paychecks I aspired to earn, to the green rolling hills of our Wisconsin farm and B&B today, Inn Serendipity and helping others launch green businesses through my book, ECOpreneuring.

Detours with a dose of serendipity quickly arose as the theme song for my last twenty years, a refrain that I wanted to leave with the graduating class.  Life may take unexpected turns, but remember, as I learned, to keep connected to the core values, your earth mission, figuring out ways to craft a life and livelihood based on your passions.

Here are some excerpts from my speech:

OPEN (Organization for Pakistani Entrepreneurs) Silicon Valley is holding their Forum ‘09 this Saturday, June 13th at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. This year, the forum will include a Cleantech track that will bring business leaders, entrepreneurs, investors, and policy makers together to discuss different perspectives of clean and sustainable technologies for the future. If you are in the San Francisco Bay Area and want a new and interesting perspective on the subject, head out to Mountain [...]

“Empower people in the US to realize that they have power to influence the global economy through their purchasing choices.” That isn’t some pie-in-the-sky wistful, unrealistic dream. That inspiring vision forms the Earth Mission, that driving force behind World of Good as they aim to transform how we shop by connecting us directly that individual who made our product, even if they are half-way around the globe.

Fostering an economy based on social and economic justice, World of Good, launched by co-founders Priya Haji and Siddharth Sanghvi — just after they graduated from University of California Berkeley Business School — features unique gifts and handcrafts from artisan communities around the world. By selling through an ever-expanding distribution network of retailers nationwide, they are building a whole new economy based on Fair Trade.

Ten percent of their profits get funneled to their sister non-profit organization, The World of Good Development Organization, which helps support artisan communities and works to strengthen international fair wage standards.

“Our aim is to make it easy to help customers make a good choice — not to buy more, but to buy differently,” explains Priya. “They can expect quality, convenience and style — yet the products can be made in a way that actually helps the people who make them. Right now, our products are women’s accessories and housewares. As World of Good grows, our aim is to make the choice for people-positive products easy to find in every category of daily life. We want every human-made product to be a tool of relationship and empowerment for the person who crafted it. Imagine every product not as a material thing but as a bridge of connection and transformation.”

June 5th is United Nations World Environment Day. The U.N. Environment Programme has setup a twitter campaign called ‘twitter for trees’. All you have to do is ‘follow’ http://twitter.com/unepandyou and they will plant a tree. The goal is to get 100,000 followers by June 5th. That plants 100,000 trees, so lets get started!

In a world overdosed with negativity, Jan Joannides roots for the opposite underdog, building an organization and livelihood around showcasing the positive side of what’s working right.

As co-founder of Renewing the Countryside, Joannides created a means to showcase positive examples of rural revitalization while simultaneously serving as an inspiring example of how one’s purpose and life can passionately blend.

As I write about in the Ecopreneur Profile found in ECOpreneuring, the seed for Renewing the Countryside stemmed from Jan’s master’s thesis work in the late 1990s profiling vibrant, diversified Minnesota farms and ranches. “As I interviewed these folks, I became so deeply inspired by their story and commitment to their family farms that I wanted to get these narratives out to the public, since the media often focus just on the negative decline of rural America,” explains Jan. Inspired by a similar venture in the Netherlands, she tapped into grant funding to publish Renewing the Countryside: Minnesota in 2001, showcasing 44 profiles of successful rural enterprises.

The enthusiastic response to this book led Jan, in partnership with her husband, Brett Olson, to found Renewing the Countryside as a non-profit organization in 2002. Its mission is to strengthen rural areas by championing and supporting rural communities, farmers, artists, entrepreneurs, educators, activists and other people who are renewing the countryside through sustainable and innovative businesses, initiatives and projects. “After all,” she says, “rural America is abundant with prospering enterprises as diverse as colors in the rainbow.” Brett leads the creative side of the organization, developing innovative public education strategies and campaigns.  It’s through our work on the Rural Renaissance book that my wife and I discovered this innovative non-profit organization, an organization that had its pulse on the revitalization happening in rural areas and the net migrations afoot from urban and suburban areas back to rural areas.

For those seeking greener pastures and products, average consumers are finding it ever easier to jump right in.

JumpGauge is an online tool allowing prospective buyers to assess and compare the environmental impacts of a growing number of products.  The site pairs seemingly common, everyday products with icons that denote their uncommon stewardship of the environment. 

The site is geared more toward mainstream buyers, those otherwise less inclined to delve deeply into the origins and impacts of things they buy. Yet as common consumers continue to turn an ever deepening shade of green, they are seeking ways to spend their green in a more eco responsible manner.

Enter JumpGauge, a  tool that requires little effort to see what goes into manufacturing and bringing a product to market. 

As traditional buyers become more aware of how the products they purchase affect the environment, they are learning too that their own interests and those of the planet are often one and the same.

The English language has a wonderful way of evolving with major or minor events in the economic, social and political history of man. Following the release of words like “Mompreneur” and “Ecopreneur”, the latest buzzword that is floating around the business and economic sphere is “Obamapreneur.” While it is clear that all “Preneur” roads lead to a noble business mission but what the heck is an Obamapreneur?

A Boston-based branding firm Cone LLC recently released a survey that quantifies consumer interest in having a two-way dialog with the companies they buy from. As we often discuss on this blog, social media is a perfect medium for mission-based companies, such as green businesses. And now eco-entrepreneurs have some real stats to chew on:

First of all 60% of Americans use social media, and the figure is higher for your market, if you sell to younger Americans.

Cone surveyed almost 1100 adults and found that (of that 60%) 85% feel that companies should interact with their customers via social media.

I found it interesting that the men surveyed were twice as likely as women to use social media to interact frequently with companies (33% versus 17%).

The purpose of mokugift is to make make tree planting easy and affordable. Making that mission a reality isn’t as easy as the concept.

Given recent green industry talk surrounding free internet and conquering the digital divide, Meraki, a leading provider of Wi-Fi networking solutions has recently decided to partner with One Economy, global non profit. The partnership pushes digital inclusion by delivering affordable broadband Wi-Fi to more than 100,000 low-income housing families.

Scott James is a frequent contributor to Planetsave. This is his first post on the Ecopreneurist.

Hi Everyone, I want to introduce you to the Carbon Advice Group. It is an international carbon offsetting venture that allows users to create their own carbon offset merchant sites. This site harnesses the spirit of social entrepreneurship in the drive to be carbon neutral by empowering anyone to set up their own personalized micro-site where they can provide carbon offsets to their family, friends or business colleagues.

Every person and business leaves a carbon footprint, perhaps most notably through travel or food consumption, and this site empowers people to take responsible action to offset the unavoidable emissions of everyday transactions. I especially like that the affiliate set-up lets people take the carbon offset message to their personal community/network/business and take a lead role in spreading that awareness. Here is a page that I set up as an example:  Scott on Carbon Advice Group.

“We want to motivate the average person in the street to get online, build their own site and get the message across to everyone they know,” says serial Social Entrepreneur and Carbon Advice Group founder Matthew Sullivan.