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.