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The Northwest Earth Institute is excited to be a part of 21 Acres non-profit school‘s offerings on sustainability and stewardship in 2012!
21 Acres, located in Woodinville, Washington, is dedicated to teaching people how to grow, eat and live sustainably. Its new series of core courses is beginning in February, with continuing education classes focusing on principles of sustainable agriculture, including those related to not only food and food systems, but also home energy and water conservation, tools for local economic development and quality of life improvement. Future courses feature NWEI’s Choices for Sustainable Living, Sustainable Systems at Work, as well as health and climate change issues.
If you are in Washington in the Sammamish Valley area, first courses are on Backyard Farming and Food Processing. For more information, call 425-481-1500 or email deb@21acres.org. You can also visit the 21 Acres website.
Is sustainable consumption relevant to your organizational goals?
Is your organization in a position to affect change industry wide?
How might you lead by example?
For a non-profit like NWEI that develops sustainability education course books intended to Inspire people to take responsibility for Earth, these questions might seem a bit redundant. However, these are only a few of the many questions that helped stimulate discussion among the NWEI staff every Wednesday during the lunch hour, over the course of five weeks, as we participated in our own newest course Sustainable Systems at Work.
It was truly inspiring to see an organization whose entire existence is based upon the concept of sustainability, walk away with so many great initiatives. Imagine what results would come from an organization taking the course that has yet to fully embrace the importance of sustainability!
Our valuable take-aways from the course included, but were not limited to:
- Creating a comprehensive power-saving strategy implemented among staff and office, as well as delivering suggestions for the entire building.
- Initiating two NWEI discussion courses within our building and among tenants, with the aspiration of creating an Olympic Mills Building Green Team in the future.
- Evaluating all forms of natural and human capital necessary to run NWEI, and assessed how to responsibly account for those resources. One example: we made plans to plant trees on a regular basis, as a staff, in order to offset the paper needed to produce our course books, and also simply to have a fun outing as a staff!
- Integrating a carbon footprint calculator into our website, with the future plan of evaluating the average impact of our course books (from the tree to your doorstep) in hopes of encouraging participants to purchase offsets for that footprint.
- Making plans to create a roof-top garden
As a new member to the NWEI team, I was at first surprised by the concept of taking our own course, and then I quickly became thrilled by the idea. The discussion course got our wonderful, intelligent staff talking, and most importantly, helped to further develop our action plan in order to advance organizational change towards a more sustainable future.
What better way to lead than by example, right? Be the change!
As many of you know, NWEI released its first organizational discussion course, Sustainable Systems at Work (SSW) last summer. The course was created in response to requests from the businesses we’ve worked with, who wanted a course that was tailored to sustainability in the business context. In a nutshell, the goal of this course is to engage employees in organizational sustainability initiatives. Now here comes the question of the chicken or the egg: Did Sustainable Systems at Work help move the concept of employee engagement to the forefront of organizational priorities, or did we create SSW as a response to the need for employee engagement? Alright, as much as I would like to think that NWEI ushered in the influx of employee engagement conversations, I know that the idea has been around for a while. Nonetheless, I can say that ever since we launched Sustainable Systems at Work, I have been seeing articles everywhere singing the praises of employee engagement.
However, I noticed that although these articles make a good case for why employee engagement was a good thing for the Triple Bottom Line, there was a lack of tools, resources, or ideas on how to actually do so. I read quite a few articles that focused on the topic, but instead of continuing to feel ignored, I decided to be proactive. I contacted Deborah Fleischer, President of Green Impact, who also writes for Triple Pundit (which often includes several articles about employee engagement). Deborah was interested in learning about Sustainable Systems at Work, and ended up posting an article about the course, employee engagement, and our work with Intel. Click here to check out her story. Now I’m not trying to say that yelling at your computer screen is an ineffective way to get your message heard; but sometimes it helps to be more proactive. And that is what employee engagement is all about, right?
Ryan Harper
Deborah McNamara
Kerry Lyles
Mike Mercer
Lacy Cagle
Carolyn White
Rob Nathan
