Lead The Change

How Allagash Brews Sustainable Practices into its Operations: A Conversation With Luke Truman  The grain is just one way it's closing the loop. Portland’s  Allagash Brewing Company  has committed to purchasing 1 million pounds of Maine-grown and -processed grain by 2021. And three days a week, a local farmer stops by the brewery to pick up spent grain, which he uses as feed for his cows. Allagash...

  Making Art, Making Change: A Conversation With Anne de Carbuccia “I wish to illuminate the damage, the breakage, the fragmentation. Somehow, if I can make it beautiful, I can make it one again.” Anne de Carbuccia is a French-American environmental artist working to document the effects of climate change. She first became interested in the era of human beings as a geological force, the Anthropoce...

Eliminating the Idea of Waste - A conversation with Tom Szaky, CEO & Founder of TerraCycle   "Why does waste even exist?" That’s the question at the heart of TerraCycle’s own existence. Since 2001, the company has been taking hard-to-recycle waste and turning it into raw material for use in new products. It operates in over 20 countries and engages over 60 million people. 2017 marked a period of s...

New York City Takes on Big Oil - A conversation with Dan Zarrilli, Chief Resilience Officer for the City of New York.  On January 10th, New York City became the first major US city to announce that the City’s $189 billion pension funds would divest City funds from fossil fuel reserve owners within five years.  Currently, the City’s five pension funds hold approximately $5 billion in securities fro...

Vermont’s Green Mountain Power obsesses on its customers. Under the leadership of CEO Mary Powell , it has radically restructured, positioning itself as an energy transformation company focused on meeting the needs of consumers with integrated, cutting-edge services that help them use less energy and save money. In the process, the utility has become the first to help its ratepayers go off the gri...

Transitioning to the Circular Economy: Thomas Singer Profiles Seven Companies Making the Shift Thomas Singer felt that there was already plenty of good writing about the theory behind the circular economy. So, when he and his Conference Board colleagues thought about what they wanted to contribute to the conversation, they focused on case studies: “real, practical examples of companies that have b...

When “Made in America” Means “Made Sustainably” Currently, fewer than 2% of shoes worn in the United States are made here. Most are manufactured overseas by a labor force that works in conditions that would not be acceptable for American workers. In contrast, Okabashi, a family-owned and operated footwear manufacturer, makes all of its shoes in America, employing more than 200 people at its factor...

Using Finance to Shatter the Fossil Fuel Economy Nick Silver — actuary, economist and onetime mainstream finance professional — understands the consequences of the financial system continuing in its current form. Which is why his new book, "Finance, Society and Sustainability: How to Make the Financial System Work for the Economy, People and Planet," argues that to avoid collateral damage to the e...

Bard MBA graduates Sam Levine and Alex FitzGerald spoke recently with Rebecca Hamilton about Badger’s business model and how it goes beyond the B Corps standard. Hamilton is a co-owner and the vice president of research and development at Badger, where she sources new raw materials and oversees the sustainability and quality of Badger’s supply chain, among other responsibilities. She is also invol...

In September, Mars unveiled its Sustainable in a Generation plan , which sets a new standard for its responsible growth as a business. Mars believes that transformational, cross-industry collaboration is required to fix the extended global supply chain, and the plan leads the way by investing $1 billion to tackle threats such as climate change, poverty in its value chain and resource scarcity. The...

Helping Refugees & Conflict-Affected Entrepreneurs Launch & Grow Their Businesses in the Middle East: Alice Bosley & Patricia Letayf of Five One Labs . What do you think when you hear the word refugee? For Alice Bosley and Patricia Letayf, Co-Founders of Five One Labs, it makes them think of innovation, passion, creativity and grit. Since the war began in Syria in 2011, nearly five million Syrian...

The Democratization of Entrepreneurship: Sherry Youssef Younes & Alejandro Crawford With a surge in the growth of the youth population worldwide there is, and will continue to be, a job shortage. The solution to this is self-employment or entrepreneurship but access to entrepreneurship is not keeping up and we may face a lost generation of job creators.  Enter Sherry Youssef Younes and Alejandro C...

Impossible Foods cooks up a new paradigm for the food system Animal protein consumption is rising worldwide. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Association estimates that the raising of livestock for meat and dairy products contributes to 14.5 percent of human-induced GHG emissions. Meat and dairy production is also heavily resource-intensive, with 30 percent of the world’s land surface used for this p...

Recycle-A-Bicycle: Fostering Job Training, Environmental Education, and Community Engagement   On average, New York City’s Recycle-A-Bicycle salvages 1,800 bicycles each year from the waste stream, diverting a total of 45,000 pounds of waste from the city’s landfills. In the past year alone, more than 1000 Recycle-A-Bicycle youth collectively refurbished 500 bicycles, pedaled 24,000 miles, and bur...

How Years of Living Dangerously Communicates the Urgency of Climate Change “Climate change isn’t stopping with the second season”—that’s Jon Meyersohn, co-executive producer of the Emmy-award winning Years of Living Dangerously , on why he hopes the series extends to a third season. Meyersohn is a journalist and producer with a thirty-year career spanning print, radio and television. As co-executi...

Publishing As A Tool for Effecting Cultural Change: Margo Baldwin of Chelsea Green Publishing Book publishing is a $28 billion industry in the United States. While there has been growth in e-books and audio books, the printed word is still the way most Americans read their books.  However, it is also a resource intensive industry that produces approximately 12.4 million metric tons of carbon annua...

Value-First Impact Investing: Cary Krosinsky on Driving Change by Doing Well   Values-first versus value-first investing. Cary Krosinsky argues that the “s” that differentiates the two represents a significant shift in the impact investing field.   Krosinsky talked with Bard MBA in Sustainability Director Eban Goodstein  about the shift from negative to positive approaches to sustainable investing...

President Trump built his personal brand on wealth using tag lines like, “You have to be wealthy in order to be great.” Shortly after Trump’s election, Bard MBA in Sustainability students Heather Bowden, Lauren Hill, Nick Shore and Catherine Tedrow spoke with filmmaker John de Graaf, who documented the consumption phenomenon of the 1990s. Their conversation explored the connections among consumpti...

Allan Savory — Zimbabwean ecologist, farmer, soldier, exile, environmentalist, international consultant and president and co-founder of the  Savory Institute  — has a world-saving message: The answer is in the soil. In the 1960s, Savory originated the concept of holistic management, which has been popularized by several articles and a  TED Talk  that has been viewed nearly 4 million times. Holisti...

There are 3.6 million female students in Afghanistan today, compared to zero in 2001. However, social limitations for women still exist — women make up only 16 percent of the current Afghan labor force. Fereshteh Forough , founder and president of  Code to Inspire  (CTI), the first coding school for girls in Afghanistan, has a passion. She wants to empower young Afghan women by hitching their econ...

More than half the U.S. population lives in states with medical or adult use cannabis laws on the books. As the nascent cannabis industry grows, some business owners are careful to  establish sustainable operations  from the beginning. Maya Elisabeth, co-founder of  Whoopi & Maya  and founder of Om Edibles, is one of those smart business owners. Maya Elisabeth began working in California’s cannabi...

All politics is local—none more than climate policy in the US after January 20, 2017. In the absence of the prospect of wider national action, local businesses have a significant opportunity to enhance the local economy and combat climate change through their operations. Glen’s Garden Market , based in Washington, DC, has been doing just this. From sourcing products within the Chesapeake Bay water...

Wendy Gordon never set out to become a tech entrepreneur. But, after several decades working with environmental organizations, she saw an opportunity. Wendy and her co-founder David Sand thought to themselves, “Wouldn't it be nice if there were a program where you could get reward points not just for spending money but for spending money wisely and for making other smart choices - like walking or...

Sustainable Business Fridays: Entrepreneurship and Giving Before Taking Martin Freeman of Bard's MBA in Sustainability spoke with Adam Kearney, Founder and CEO of Propsboard, to discuss his early beginnings as a community organizer. Kearney raised over $96,000 in four months for a family in need, taught himself how to code, and founded Propsboard-- a peer recognition start-up that uses office TVs...

Sustainable Business Fridays: Recycling the Unrecycleable with TerraCycle Alistair Hall from Bard’s MBA in Sustainability spoke with Tom Szaky, Founder and CEO of TerraCycle, to dig into this question, ‘why does garbage really exist?’ What is garbage? It’s a question that Szaky has been working to solve. Szaky and Terracycle start from the premise that everything can be recycled. Glass, metal, pla...