This blog is part of a series about permaculture, drawing on experiences in a Permaculture Design Course I am taking with Chop Wood Carry Water Permaculture in Nottingham, NH. “We must stop expecting the earth to produce more, but start doing more with what the earth produces.” – GUNTER PAULI, Upsizing: The Road to… Read more
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Gathering to Launch the Vermont Farm to Plate Network
The state of Vermont had committed to double local food production over 10 years, as a way to boost economic development, increase jobs, and increase access to healthy food. The Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund (VSJF) had gathered input from hundreds of Vermonters to create a Farm to Plate Strategic Plan that defined the sub-goals and… Read more
Insights on Strategic Questioning
When you teach you learn. I recently taught a workshop on Strategic Questioning at the Harvard John F. Kennedy School of Government, as part of a Leadership Survival Skills workshop series for New England alumni. For background, Strategic Questioning is a technique of asking open questions that inspire movement and new insights/ideas. Strategic questions are… Read more
Boosting the Networking at NHBSR’s Spring Conference
We recently helped New Hampshire Business for Social Responsibility (NHBSR) start off its Spring Conference with a focused networking session. After welcoming remarks by the conference hosts, Beth Tener facilitated a one-hour session to generate new connections by creating ways for people to have meaningful conversations in small groups. The room of about 170 people… Read more
What is the Right Question?
At the recent Stonyfield Entrepreuneurship Institute, a boot camp for community-minded entrepreneurs, small business leaders, such as Vermont Cookie Love and Breakwind Farm (specializing in baked beans, no joke) presented a ten-minute overview of their business and asked for input on a key question or two. A panel of experienced advisers provided advice and feedback…. Read more
Horizontal Loyalty
Imagine this time of sustainability transition as a wave, where all along the leading edge are people and organizations inventing new ways of using clean energy, renewing democracy, creating businesses that solve social problems, and thousands of other innovations to create a better future. Each person or initiative, in their own way, has to go… Read more
Getting Beyond the Plan that Sits on a Shelf
After 20 years of consulting, I have dedicated a lot of time to developing action plans and reports. Like me, thousands of people have devoted countless hours of meetings, research, and writing to develop plans for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, implementing a sustainability strategy, etc. You know the reports with goals, specific recommendations, nice graphics,… Read more
Collaborating to Enhance Energy Efficiency in Transportation
New Directions Collaborative, in collaboration with Sonia Hamel of Hamel Environmental Consulting and Pat Field of the Consensus Building Institute, helped to facilitate a cross-agency collaborative process to develop a framework for considering energy efficiency and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in transportation decision-making. The initiative was led by the Colorado Department of Transportation and the… Read more
Energy Smart Transportation Initiative
What does it take to make the transportation sector more energy efficient? The State Smart Transportation Initiative (SSTI) sponsored the Colorado Energy Smart Transportation Initiative to explore this question. New Directions Collaborative, in collaboration with Sonia Hamel of Hamel Environmental Consulting and Pat Field of the Consensus Building Institute, helped to facilitate a cross-agency collaborative… Read more
If We Only Knew What We Know
Collaboration tools, such as blogs and Twitter, are changing the way people interact and the way information can flow within and across organizations. In a recent interview in MIT Sloan Review with Andree McAfee of the Center for Digital Business at MIT shared his take on what sells CEO’s on social media. He uses the… Read more