Only 7% of investor money goes to women-led startups. We’re going to help crush those stats!! Folks, the Women Startup Challenge is on a roll. In Round I, over $315,000 was raised by the startups. A panel of judges consisting of investors and tech experts reviewed the 25 startups that raised the most money in Round I for viability and promise. Twelve women-led startups were chosen to move to the final round.
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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 […]
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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.
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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.
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This month we’re all about sharing stories of girls and women around the world who are beating inequality and empowering their communities along the way. Well, here’s one about a different sort of female empowerment—the kind that lights up the night, makes light bulbs shine bright, and literally powers communities. It also features donkeys lugging solar panels around the Kenyan savanna, which is not a sentence I get to write everyday.
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“Loliware was born because, as designers, we wanted to have fun getting super-creative with a material, but we have a bigger vision that Loliware will replace a percentage of the plastic cups destined for the landfill.”
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In order to run my zero-waste kitchen, I need to plan my shopping trips a bit. Before heading to the farmer’s market or grocery store, I take a look at the running shopping list on my phone and add a few things we might need. List in hand, I gather my zero-waste equipment. The list helps me figure out what I’ll need and while shopping, I stick closely to it. 1. Glass jars I use my glass jars at the bulk bins. Get the weight on these before you fill them up. At some stores, customer service will weigh them for you and mark the tare on them. Other stores set out scales and you weigh the jars yourself. The cashier will deduct the weight of the jar from your food when checking you out so you pay for weight of the food only. Lately I’ve been taking jars to the farmer’s market for berries. That way I bring home whole fruit rather than jam. A health food store in my daughter’s university town, Guelph, Ontario, Stone Store, doesn’t charge for all packaging but it does charge for nut butter containers, which I find brilliant. How many students will forget a jar […]
Continue reading... →I have attended many Clean Tech conferences in the southwest over the last six months. Frankly, I wish I saw more women in the room. So this post on EcoAid’s website really resonated with me, so I am sharing it with you. It’s a juicy topic. Please join in on the conversation by leaving your comments below. And if you are a woman working in clean tech now, what do you know now that you didn’t know before that could help other women wanting to enter the clean energy sector? — Carolyn
Women across the nation are preparing to play an integral role in the green economy, and the United States will need their help if we’re going to pull ourselves out of the recession and compete in the new economy on a global scale. CAP’s Jorge Madrid has the story in this repost.
It’s true that men have been hit the hardest in the recession as far an unemployment numbers go, but we will need to seize the opportunity to diversify the future workforce in a way that will incorporate all workers in all areas of the clean energy economy—including those where women have been traditionally underrepresented.
Women in Burlington, Vermont are training for careers in the fields of green construction, renewable energy, and energy efficiency as part of the Vermont Works for Women project. Women Going Green in Atlanta, Georgia is educating women in management and entrepreneurial opportunities in the clean energy economy. And young women in Los Angeles, California are receiving science, technology, engineering, and math education through the Infrastructure Academy, which will prepare them for high-paying, high-demand careers developing the next generation of clean energy technology.
Continue reading... →“It is essential that our most talented and driven women come together to fast forward the green economy,” says Kathleen Rogers, President of Earth Day Network, the organization that is widely viewed as the birth of the modern environmental movement with over 22,000 partners in 192 countries. “We think that women will look at it differently, build it differently, and at the very least, should have a major seat at the table in a major way around the world.” But the fact is we don’t. Women hold less than 20% of the top tier position across the board in corporations and in the political arena. “We are conspicuously absent from the power broker positions,” says Rogers.
The Earth Day Network, under Rogers leadership, has launched a campaign to change all of that. Their WAGE (Women and the Green Economy) campaign’s purpose is to accelerate and provide the new thinking and creative power for a global post-carbon economy by engaging women business, government and NGO leaders. Its goal is to create a policy agenda for Rio+20 and relevant generate national initiatives that will promote the green economy, secure educational and job training opportunities for women and channel green investment to benefit women.
“The idea behind WAGE is as we create a global green economy,” says Rogers, “women need to be at the table.” Kathleen Rogers certainly is. Are you? Listen to this podcast now. It’s a rally call to all women everywhere to turn up the volume of our leadership right in the very communities we live. The time is now. Let’s seize it.
Continue reading... →I went to the Santa Fe Farmers Market and asked shoppers what they thought about the Dalai Lama’s bold statement, “The world will be saved by the western women.” This show is a montage of responses from both women and men. I wonder what would happen if I asked this around the country? What would women say in Boston? What would the men say in Lexington, Kentucky? In Boise, Detroit, Amarillo?
We really want to know what you think. Go ahead and put your response and city location in the comment box below to: Can western women save the world? If you want my 2 cents, here it is.
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