There is nothing like finding the right partnerships and collaborations to expand your reach fast. If you do it right, you not only increase your influence dramatically but your income as well. Attend the Art of Collaboration webinar today to learn more!
Continue reading... →
Transplanting Traditions Community Farm is helping Burmese farmers create new community. The farmers’ market in Carrboro, North Carolina is filled with local staples like lettuce, tomatoes, and eggs. But if you turn left after the welcome booth, you’ll find a table that offers less common crops like pennywort, lime leaves, and kermit eggplant. That table belongs to Tri Sa, a Karen refugee farmer from Burma, present-day Myanmar. Her stand is called “Mu Tar K’Paw Gardens,” a Karen saying which translates to “everything comes from sunlight.” Tri Sa grows many traditional herbs and vegetables at Transplanting Traditions Community Farm, with 27 other Karen refugee families. The farm started as a community garden for low-income families in the Chapel Hill-Carrboro area, and it attracted many Karen farmers who asked for more space. Thanks to land donated by the Triangle Land Conservancy, the farm expanded into a five-acre operation. The Karen are a Burmese ethnic minority group, many of whom fled agriculture-centered communities Burma to escape violence and persecution by the Burmese military regime in the mid-2000s. Thousands of the refugees went to camps in Thailand before ending up in the United States. There are now nearly 70,000 Karen living in the U.S., […]
Continue reading... →
The Ethical Fashion Forum wants to “do fashion better.” To achieve that, the London-based industry body is shoring up its arsenal of tools and services to help fashion professionals and businesses boost their sustainable and ethical profiles. The rebranded “Mysource”, which Ethical Fashion Forum founder Tamsin Lejeune describes as the organization’s “next phase,” will build on the current “Source” platform. One major improvement? A Match.com-style algorithm to pair users with people and resources best-suited to their needs, “so that fabric, manufacturer, market report, line sheet template, or business connection you were looking for will pop up straight away,” Lejeune explained. FASHION DONE BETTER Mysource will also rank users according to an “integrated bench-marking system” that includes social, environmental, and commercial criteria. “We’re working with partner organizations to make this as robust as it can be. The higher users are ranked, the more profile they get on the site,” said Lejeune. “So that small, Ethiopian shoe brand with a great product that is changing lives, could stand out to buyers and get extensive profile on the site.” But all these bells and whistles don’t come cheap. The Ethical Fashion Forum says it’s hoping to raise £400,000 through Crowdcube to take the […]
Continue reading... →
Visit San Francisco, and you might see a bicycle whizzing past with dozens of bouquets. While receiving flowers always makes people smile, Farmgirl Flowers gives people even more reasons to smile—sustainable practices and American-grown flowers. Here, Farmgirl Flower founder Christina Stemble talks with Urban Farm about how she keeps her blooming business—now nationwide—in line with her mission of sustainability. How did Farmgirl Flowers get its start? I started Farmgirl Flowers about five years ago, in Nov. 2010, with an idea of how to change the way flowers are purchased in the U.S. I’d like to say I started the business because I have a passion for flower, but in truth it wasn’t a burning desire to work with flowers: It was a dream to start a business that did something good. When working at Stanford University as the director of alumni relations and campaign outreach for the law school, I noticed that the flowers we would order for events cost more than I thought they should. That led me to start researching the flower industry, which is when I found that it was a huge industry, but with a tremendous number of problems and very little innovation. So I set […]
Continue reading... →
Oh Marketing Whiz Who is Always Hungry to Learn More! Back in 2013, The Santa Fe Reporter interviewed me and at the very end I was asked: “any final wisdom?” My last words were, “My hope is that someday we don’t even have to use the word ‘green’—it’s just the way it is.” It’s been 12 years now that my company, Mind Over Markets, has been dedicated to helping green and socially-focused companies, organizations, and entrepreneurs take their products and services to the next level. It’s what we believe in, what we are passionate about. When we put that stake in the ground, we never looked back (even though back then “green” was used with caution in marketing because of its tree-hugger status and political connotations). Well, those days are gone. This week, the Shelton Group released a study on the effectiveness of eco buzzwords like “green,” “eco-friendly,” “sustainable,” “recyclable,” “renewable,” “low carbon footprint,” and more. The results happily report that green has gone from “niche appeal” to “baseline expectation.” For instance, 65% of the 2,000 plus respondents said that “green was considered desirable.” And it really doesn’t matter what side of the fence you are on because 67% of them were Democrats and 62% […]
Continue reading... →
Women Of Green community is all about celebrating the many women who are leading the way in green, sustainability and social justice — from authors and artists, chefs and lawyers, activists, journalists, mommies, policy makers and social entrepreneurs. These women are here to make a difference and use their voices and talents to create meaningful change on behalf of the planet and future generations.
Continue reading... →
Ecouterre interviews Linda Greer, Director of the Natural Resources Defense Council Linda Greer ranks among the fashion industry’s leading “toxic avengers.” As director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s five-year-old “Clean by Design” initiative, Greer is on the front line of a sector burdened by high energy and water use and endemic, often catastrophic, pollution. Her Sisyphean task? To leverage the purchasing power of multinational brands and retailers to chip away at the environmental impacts of their manufacturing abroad, beginning with the biggest offender: China. As NRDC prepares to, in its own words, “aggressively expand” the program’s reach, Ecouterre caught up with Greer to learn about her “win-win” strategy, what the early days of Clean by Design were like, and how we can differentiate the “true-gooders” from the “green-washers” in a post–corporate-social-responsibility world. E: How did Clean by Design get its start? LG: In 2008, the president of NRDC asked me to develop a project that would help to reduce the heavy industrial air and water pollution in China and serve as a model the country could use to accelerate its efforts. To do so, I first selected an industry with a heavy environmental footprint. Textiles distinguished itself as one […]
Continue reading... →
Karen Warner founded Big Head Farm in 2009, located in southwest Michigan. After experiencing the challenges of starting a farm and creating a viable business, Warner began thinking through ways to support new farmers and to protect small to mid-sized farms from going out of production. Warner is currently working to advance a farm accelerator model that would give farmers the resources and support they need to succeed from start-up to retirement.
Continue reading... →
Women Of Green is proud to be a media partner in the 6th Annual Women In Green Forum to be held August 26th in Los Angeles, California. Promoted as a unique conference experience set in the hills of Los Angeles, the Women In Green Forum has emerged as the premier conference series highlighting women’s impact on the environmental industry.
Continue reading... →
About Being Extraordinary in the Age of Vulnerability. As more and more of us splinter away from the corporate grind and put ourselves out there in the freelance world, and as we aim to be known and hired for the value we bring to business and to the world, we face the challenge of overcoming the concept of commodity pricing in the marketplace, or rather, being the lowest common denominator. If your competitor charges X for her services, how can you possibly charge Y? Let me tell you how: It’s not about price point. It’s about value.
Continue reading... →