News Updates

By Lisa Chacón

On Saturday morning the Whistler regional gathering kicked off with 34 people in attendance, at the beautiful public library, a LEED Gold building. Magda, Rachelle and Heather welcomed us, set the context of our gathering as one of many - in Australia, London, Karlskrona and Boston - all exploring the theme of “how to increase our impact by ten-fold.” After a round of introductions, we broke into small World Café groups to explore the following questions, led by Katie Pease ‘07:

• Improve the Human Condition
  What are the leverage points for turning the current economic crisis into an opportunity to elevate & empower those people typically excluded from mainstream economy?
• Market Individual Consultancies / Professional Development
  How can we leverage the extraordinary energy and experience of our network and bring this collaborative spirit to our work?
• Re-conceive Corporate Culture

What’s the best way to achieve a cultural shift in corporations? What strategies work best and what hasn’t worked when implementing sustainability in corporations? 

• Communicate Sustainability
  How can we harness human energy by inviting people to something meaningful and begin seeing the world with new eyes? How can we tell better stories about sustainability? When communicating climate change, what’s the right balance of conveying threat and opportunity?
• The Power of One
  What’s the best way for one person to have the most impact? How can we feed the soul of our community while nurturing our own?
• Permeate School Curriculum
  How can visioning, backcasting, and a systems-perspective be incorporated into the classroom?

After these rich discussions and a subsequent report-out session, we enjoyed a zero waste lunch (see the final report on the Zero Waste Challenge by Jen Nichols ‘08), and an excellent  presentation by the current MSLS class in Karlskrona on the Sustainability Toolbox.

Laura MacKay ‘05 emceed the Saturday afternoon program, which included a series of presentations from local sustainability leaders and some “power users” of the TNS framework:

• Anne Duffy, the Corporate Sustainability Officer of VANOC, the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, gave a presentation on how sustainability is being incorporated into the games. For the first time, sustainability has been included in the overall vision statement! Key sustainability objectives included: 1) Accountability, 2) Environmental Stewardship & Impact Reduction, 3) Social Inclusion & Responsibility, 4) Aboriginal Participation & Collaboration, 5) Economic Benefits from Sustainability, and 6) Sport for Sustainable Living. Anne’s perspective on how the definition of sustainability has evolved over the past few games was particularly interesting. The level of rigor for sustainability measures, accountability and expectations is much higher now.

• David Waldron, Strategic Advisor for the Suzuki Foundation, co-founder of Synapse Strategies, and founding member of MSLS program team at BTH, gave a presentation on his post-Karlskrona adventures including his tenure with the Suzuki Foundation. He shared how his career had been shaped by a special formula: Conversation - Serendipity - Opportunity. In other words, being present for seminal conversations, plus a dash of serendipity, which ultimately led to exciting opportunities. For those who remember our friend Manfred Max-Neef telling us to ‘drift in alertness,’ this sounded very familiar!

• Ted Battiston, now the Strategic Energy and Emissions Manager of the Whistler Centre for Sustainability, gave a rapid fire presentation describing his role during the Whistler2020 process as the Manager of Sustainability Initiatives for the Resort Municipality of Whistler. He created more than a few lightbulb moments - particularly with his story of teaching himself how to calculate key financial metrics using Wikipedia - NPV (net present value) and IRR (internal rate of return). He doesn’t use ROI as an argument for capital investments anymore, instead he says “show me any investment you could make today that will give you a better rate of return than the 10-15% that this renewable energy system will give you.” Learning to speak the language of business to this degree was a very powerful point. Don’t expect the number crunchers to do the math in their heads - give them the data and they might even become powerful allies.

• Arthur DeJong, the Mountain Planning and Environmental Resource Manager of Whistler-Blackcomb Resort shared from the heart with moving stories of life on the mountain. He emphasized the importance of transparency and “blunt honesty,” as an ethical stance. A devastating spill had occurred at one of the maintenance facilities he was responsible for - a diesel tank without any safety shutoffs was accidentally emptied into a fish-bearing creek downhill from the fueling site, with no barrier in between. He met the press the next day and acknowledged their fault for the terrible accident, and said that their entire operation would be examined and upgraded to prevent such things in the future. His hard-won lesson was that without that level of true-grit honesty, it wouldn’t have been possible to engage in real dialogue and build trust going forward.

by Lisa Chacón

Several of us from the class of ‘06 converged in Seattle - Ingrid Jacobsen, Miriam Karell, Melanie Dubin, Itzel Orozco, Pete Sims and I. From there we drove to Vancouver to meet up with a few more ‘06ers - Magdalena Szpala, Rachelle McElroy and Margaret McRoberts. It was a sweet reunion, particularly for those who hadn’t seen each other in nearly three years (yes, it really has been that long)!

Friday, February 6

On Friday morning we all attended a pre-conference workshop in Vancouver on the TNS framework, presented by Rachelle and Magda. Overall there were 34 people attending the workshop - about half were MSLS alumni and the rest were members of the public. The ladies did a great job of introducing the TNS framework, principles and the ABCD process. I always enjoy hearing how others present the material, especially now that we have all integrated the framework into our thinking, and also have gained experience applying it in the real world.

Guest speaker Ken Melamed, the mayor of Whistler, told us how Whistler used the TNS framework to develop the Whistler2020 master plan, which subsequently won the Federation of Canadian Municipalities Sustainable Community Award and the United Nations Liveable Communities gold medal in the ‘Planning for the Future’ category in 2005. The most  impressive thing that Ken shared was the Whistler2020 explorer, an online system that provides feedback on key metrics, which in itself won an innovation award from the Canadian Association of Municipal Administrators.  

On Friday afternoon we left Vancouver and drove north past still, dark waters and the snowy pine covered mountains as we made our pilgrimage to the TNS mecca of sustainability. After hearing so many stories about the legendary Whistler, we were excited to finally see it for ourselves! We shared accommodations with a few more alumni - Heather Worosz ‘05, Sarah Brooks ‘08 and Heidi Blankenship-Speight ‘08, and got a chance to make new friends and catch up with old ones over a fabulous home-cooked meal and wine.

By Tamara Connell

This day we finally made it to Melbourne, the last stop of our Hållbarhet2009 Learning Journey. We were greeted at CERES (the Centre for Education and Research in Environmental Strategies) by Philip Sutton of the Greenleap Strategic Institute. Philip is the co-author of a new book called Climate Code Red, where the climate crisis (and their view of the most appropriate response(s)) is discussed. For more information, you can read or listen to a recent interview with Philip here. For me, this was a poignant reminder that if we are serious about creating a sustainable society, we really need to start tackling the climate change issue as rapidly as possible - perhaps more rapidly that anything we can currently imagine. We shouldn’t lull ourselves to thinking that just because we understand sustainability and strategic planning, that we are simply doing our part. We need action, quite frankly, and on a massive scale. Again, I ask myself, is scaling up 10 times enough…

After lunch, we were provided a very informative site tour of the CERES garden/park/facilities. We learned much about the permaculture design, the composting toilets, the community food programmes, the alternative energy created on site, etc. It was inspiring to see what a dedicated group of volunteers can do, and it’s an amazing model for working with nature to satisfy many of our human needs. If only we could have one of these sites in every city, children would have the ability to learn and play within nature, and hopefully grow up with a better understanding of humans as one connected part of nature. The projects, research, education and training provided at CERES are extensive, and I highly recommend that you check out their website for more information.

With the usual 10 minutes to get ready, we dropped our bags at our last hostel and ‘freshened’ up. This evening we were to be hosted at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) by the kind folks at the Centre for Sustainability Leadership. They had invited an impressive array of like-minded networks to join us for an evening Dialogue Café. The Café was facilitated by the lively and humourous Jason Clarke. It was an interesting new take on the typical Dialogue/World Café that we are used to in MSLS - a bit like speed dating for networks interested to reach sustainability. We had a great time and met many new sustainability friends. There seems to be great momentum for sustainability action in Melbourne!