Green Champions

Marcus Hazelwood is the Director of Optimization Services at EA Energy Solutions in Columbus, Ohio, the founder of Haze Enterprises, and the host of the Clear Haze Exchange podcast. He helps building owners understand how their buildings actually use energy and what to do about it. Born and raised in Columbus, he spent about eight years in Boston, had his first child during COVID, and moved home t...

Everyone listening is a sensor in their community. That idea, sparked by last season's conversation about neighborhood air quality sensors, sets the tone as Green Champions opens Season 7. First, a look back at the MORPC partnership: three guests, six episodes, and a peek behind the curtain at how a region moves on greenways, trails, air quality, and its 2050 sustainability plan. There is a t...

For most of a decade, a vision for 500 miles of connected trails across Central Ohio got the same reaction: nice idea, no money, we will be long gone before it happens. Then Franklin County voters passed a sales tax, and the math flipped overnight. The region went from spending two to four million dollars a year on sidewalks, bikeways, and trails to sixty million a year, from now on. Melinda Vonst...

Melinda Vonstein leads the Greenways Planning Studio at MORPC, where she plans and expands Central Ohio's network of trails and works to connect communities across the region. Her origin story starts with a broken glass table. When it shattered in her backyard a little over a decade ago, her family dug up the grass instead of cleaning up the mess, built a patio, and never really stopped diggi...

The EPA can call it a good air quality day while your own street tells a different story. Residents across Franklin County kept saying exactly that, and it is why MORPC built the Community-Led Enhanced Air Quality Network, a set of sensors roughly the size of a baseball that plug into an outlet, find the Wi-Fi, and publish their readings where anyone can look them up. JR Diaz-Hernandez runs that w...

JR Diaz-Hernandez goes by the initials of two men. The J is his great-grandfather. The R is Roberto, the grandfather who helped raise him through his first nine years. He is now the air quality and sustainability program manager at MORPC, protecting public health across Central Ohio through forecasting, alerts, and neighborhood-level air monitoring. It started in Oak Cliff, a Dallas neighborhood w...

For some communities, the word "sustainability" itself is the hurdle, tangled up in politics and easy to dismiss before the real work even starts. Brandi Whetstone spends her days getting past that. As director of sustainability at the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission, or MORPC, she runs Sustainable2050, the framework that has 39 communities, from small villages to the City of Colum...

Brandi Whetstone is the director of sustainability at the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission, or MORPC, where she has spent 16 years helping Central Ohio communities plan for a healthier, more livable future. The MORPC miniseries opens by tracing how a kid from Bryan, Ohio turned a childhood of bikes, backyard kickball, and fishing trips with her dad into a career spent protecting the places pe...

Season 5 closes the way the best conversations do, by looking back at who was in the room. This wrap-up gathers the guests, the surprises, and the moments that stuck, and it marks a first: the season that welcomed a new co-host to the show. What comes through is how often an interview stopped being an interview. The real turn is the moment a guest feels seen and the pressure drops away, and sudden...

Buildings carry carbon long before anyone turns on a light, locked into the steel and concrete it took to put them up. Josh Lloyd's job is to drive that number down. As Regional Sustainability Manager at Turner Construction, the firm ranked the number one green builder every year since 2008, he leads sustainability across 10 offices in eight states, on job sites where one decision about a con...

Josh Lloyd is the Regional Sustainability Manager at Turner Construction, where he leads sustainability work across 10 offices in eight states. He came up through architecture, adopted LEED early enough to have watched it launch, and volunteered the design and construction documents for the first LEED Platinum home in Ohio, a house built by high school students. The path there started with a dad w...

Most people think a solid waste district exists to run the landfill. Mary Cropenbaker's job is the opposite: keep as much material out of it as possible. As the Assistant Solid Waste Manager at Hamilton County ReSource, she works with businesses, schools, and communities across the Cincinnati region to divert waste, and she does it without a single mandate to force anyone's hand. Her ans...

Mary Cropenbaker is the Assistant Solid Waste Manager at Hamilton County ReSource, the solid waste district for the Cincinnati region, where she helps businesses, schools, and communities cut what they send to the landfill. She piloted 513 Green, a free sustainability certification now used by dozens of local organizations. But her path into waste and sustainability started somewhere you would nev...

There is not enough public money in the world to fund the clean energy transition. That gap sits at the center of Vin Valentino's work, and his answer is the green bank, a purpose-driven financial institution built to stretch every public dollar and pull private capital in behind it. As the Energy Economy Lead for the Washington State Department of Commerce, Vin helped stand up Washington&apo...

Vin Valentino is the Energy Economy Lead for the Washington State Department of Commerce, where he works to grow the state's clean energy economy through investment, policy strategy, and partnerships across government, industry, and communities. He holds an interdisciplinary degree in applied sustainability from Ohio State University, and his path has run from a craft brewery in Columbus, Ohi...

Francesca Cercelletta, creative director for ReGeneration Hub Friuli and graphic designer for Zegna, brings a unique blend of artistic vision and sustainability passion to NanoValbruna. As the organizer of "Frame The Change," a short film festival within the forum, she champions the power of visual storytelling in communicating complex environmental issues. Francesca shares her journey i...

A resort that generates 25 tons of waste every single day has two choices: manage it badly or build something worth talking about. Jake Kheel, VP of Sustainability at Grupo Puntacana, chose the latter. He's back this week to get into the real work: composting at industrial scale, coral reef restoration, a hawk conservation project that now has 150 birds on property, and why climate change has...

Jake Kheel is VP of Sustainability at Grupo Puntacana, one of the Caribbean's most recognized leaders in sustainable tourism. He's also a conservationist, author, and co-director of the award-winning documentary Death By a Thousand Cuts . It started with a boarding school study abroad program Jake applied to on a whim. He had no idea his great-uncle Ted Kheel was one of the founders of G...

In 2023 alone, 235 million tons of food went uneaten or unsold in the United States. The number one item clogging landfills is not furniture, not plastic, not diapers. It is food. And 47 million Americans are food insecure at the same time. Regina Harmon, CEO of Food Recovery Network, returns to break down exactly how that happens, what her organization is doing about it, and how college students...

Regina Harmon is the CEO of Food Recovery Network, the largest student-led movement fighting food waste and hunger in the US. Before she was leading a national nonprofit, she was a kid in Maine with a cloth lunch bag, a working poor family, and a growing sense that the world was not set up fairly. Dominique and Christy sit down with Regina to hear how a life shaped by nature, identity, and literat...

Most people don't think much about what happens to the food that doesn't get sold. Mason McNeill does. As Chief Commercial Officer at Denali, the nation's largest organics recycler, he's spent his career building the systems that catch that material before it hits a landfill and put it back to work. Denali runs routes to grocery stores and food producers across all of the lower...

Mason McNeill is the Chief Commercial Officer at Denali, the nation's largest organics recycler. But before he was thinking about food waste and circular supply chains, he was a young investment banker in Little Rock, learning how to tell the story of businesses that had spent decades building something worth believing in. Mason grew up in the Arkansas River Valley and showed up to college kn...

Elizabeth Schuster and Marissa Ferrari are the co-founders of Sustainable Economies, a research-driven consulting firm working at the intersection of nature and community. They're back together on the podcast to share how they built a business from a single lunch conversation, why strategy and storytelling are stronger when they're developed side by side, and what it actually looks like...

Marissa Ferrari is Partner and Creative Director at Sustainable Economies, where she works with mission-driven organizations at the intersection of nature and communities. Her winding path that took her from a childhood in rural Michigan to a career in brand strategy and communications, and what she's learned about creativity, storytelling, and finding your way when the road doesn't run...

Elizabeth Schuster is the founder of Sustainable Economies, a strategic planning, branding, and communications firm, and a partner in environmental economics. Her sustainability journey started from building forts in the New Hampshire woods to transforming a struggling Peace Corps assignment into a certified organic coffee co-op in Honduras. She grew up on 17 acres in New Hampshire, where early ye...