22 June 2010

Reinventing Ourselves

Posted by Admin under: Events; Forum; Leadership .

The path to a more sustainable future is likely to have as many setbacks as successes, and we’ve been having plenty of both lately. The opening of the “Greenable Woodbridge Museum of the Future,” at the Woodbridge Center mall, on June 11 and 12, was certainly a success, and was in many ways a triumph of pure imagination. Nothing like this has, to the best of our knowledge, ever been tried before; a year-long community outreach and engagement project focused on green initiatives located in a mall.

To separate oneself from it, at the same time as it is being born, has the sense of  abandoning a child—in the case into the hands of two young people, Ashley Strain and Kelly Reidy, who are serving as interns to the Mayor this summer. The Museum remains a living asset, a canvas for possibility, a venue that will gather steam with a wide range of events, programs, movies, displays, and other uses. Of course, it needs to be widely advertised, scheduled, and staffed by volunteers from all of its supporting organizations.

But it surpassed our expectations as an innovative opportunity, allowing us to plant a seed of green consciousness in the midst of that monument to America’s consumer culture, the shopping mall. Is it possible to visualize a time when malls will be taken over by people using them to grow things, to educate themselves, to recycle and reuse, and to hold organizing meetings and social events. It still has a long way to go, but the idea struck some people as one with potentially national implications, if it’s done right over the long term.

For a photo album of the opening, click here.

To say that this achievement was bittersweet is something of an understatement. I learned a couple of weeks before the opening that our team, representing the newly-created Center for Leadership in Sustainability (about which more later), had not been selected to manage and develop the Woodbridge Green Technology Incubator (itself the first element of the Woodbridge Green Technology Park), and a week after that there would be no funding to continue my work with the Museum. For us these are pretty major setbacks; but at the same time they have opened up some other opportunities, and given us a breather to rethink our mission and its execution.

The most important of these opportunities is the Haiti initiative, which has now grown into a partnership with UNA-Haiti and other organizations to mobilize the private sector to implement a sustainable-development reconstruction strategy in Haiti. In partnership with the UN Global Compact, the Clinton Foundation, The Association of Private Universities in Haiti as well as FDU and the International Association of University Presidents, The Diasporan Touch, the Soros Economic Development Fund, and a wide range of other well-established organizations, the Sustainable Haiti Coalition which Doug Cohen and I launched at the Sustainable Haiti Conference in Miami in March, is now helping to plan a “side-event” at the Global Compact’s 2010 Leaders Summit, a gathering of more than 1000 people from socially-responsible companies, governments, and NGOs around the world, and follow-on activities to establish a Haitian-International Development Fund as a coordinated effort to bring significant private investment to the reconstruction of Haiti.

The Coalition will eventually get it own web site; in the meantime I continue to provide occasional updates on our work for Haiti at

A Sustainable Future for Haiti

The Global Compact event is intended to solicit commitments from funds and companies to work together to ensure that (a) some portion of the donor capital provided for aid is actually leveraged to ensure greater private investment in Haiti, (b) that investment is focused on long term sustainable redevelopment of the country at all levels, from agriculture, to energy, to tourism, to higher education, to export, and to cultural and community restoration.

Another major focus is our work on community energy aggregation with another NJ nonprofit, Cooling America thru Local Leadership (CALL), which is pretty well described at NJCCEA.org. It seems that responsibility for sustainable development is increasingly shifting from the federal government and the states (which are essentially bankrupt) to more local governments. These local governments are also economically constrained, but they are more accessible to control by the community, and at least potentially more responsive to the needs of their immediate constituents.

Unfortunately Americans have drunk deeply of the snake oil of right-wing ideology, and having convinced themselves that the solution to all problems is not better government but less government, have thereby largely eviscerated the very institutions that alone are capable of addressing the systemic problems we now face—the degradation of the commons, the irresponsibility of public and private corporations, the increasing gap between rich and poor, the deterioration of social infrastructure and so on. America is, literally, in decline, its erstwhile commitment to raise up the poor and huddled masses now largely forgotten, and its community-oriented culture now drowned out by a cheapened media, a degraded educational system, and a fractured political discourse that has either misread or forgotten its intellectual history.

This brings me, finally, to this month’s Sustainable Leadership Forum program:

1. Matt Polsky, Senior Fellow at the Institute for Sustainable Enterprise at FDU, will present:

“Sustainability Change-Making Over 30 Years: Barriers and Opportunities.”

As he describes it, “It’s basically what I do, how I do it, my philosophy, some of the projects with which I’m involved.”

Matt has been an advocate, a researcher, a provocateur, and a change agent in multiple venues in New Jersey for more than 30 years, standing up for the environment in policy and program action against a range of forces and outcomes.

Currently the Director of the Land Trust for the Passaic River Coalition, Matt has extensive sustainability and green economy experience, as well as unique cross-sector experience working in government, for environmental groups, business, and as an adjunct professor. He was the Sustainability Team Leader at the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, led an interagency sustainability work group, and advised sustainability initiatives. He has taught sustainability courses at Cook College, Kean University, Montclair State University, NJIT, and Ramapo College. He was a marketing manager at AT&T Microelectronics. As Director of the Land Trust for the PRC, he has bought and preserved 251 acres of land for the environmental group. He volunteers for many environmental and sustainability groups at all scales, ranging from some in his town (Cranford), the State, to internationally, helping NGOs and students in South Africa, Brazil, and Europe.

2. Michael McMillan, Senior Vice President responsible for Young America’s Client Services and Contact Centers, will facilitate a discussion that seeks to create innovative ways that businesses can leverage what they are doing in sustainability to benefit their customers and the planet, while generating higher returns to be reinvested in sustainability.

Cause-related marketing creates situations that consumers and companies feel good about: giving back, while driving sales. Research has revealed that a resounding 79% of customers would switch brands to one that contributes to a good cause. Michael is interested in better understanding sustainability in order to create new Marketing Programs for businesses. He is looking forward to hearing everyone’s input and finding ways to grow sustainability awareness, value and results for his business clients and their customers. This is a chance for you to learn about marketing while influencing how companies use marketing around sustainability to make a difference on the planet.

Young America creates Marketing Solutions for businesses to acquire, grow and retain their customers. Mike has over 26 years of telecommunications leadership experience in sales, marketing, wholesale and retail operations, quality and process management and sales training. He holds an MBA in Management from Xavier University and a BBA in Marketing & Management from the University of Cincinnati.

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