If you're enrolled in this course, it's pretty safe to assume you want to be part of your company's or your community's sustainability efforts. Perhaps you've even set a personal goal of someday being the sustainability director or vice president of corporate social responsibility. Hello, I'm Ken Bettenhausen, and in this lesson, I'm going to introduce you to some of the people who hold those positions. They're people who actually are responsible for and actually do sustainability in their companies and organizations, and they are going to share what their jobs entail and how they got there. The business school at the University of Colorado Denver has an amazing advisory council. Over 40 people who do sustainability at their firms share their knowledge and perspectives with us and our students, and ensure the courses we teach are cutting edge. Each member is a sustainable business champion who has navigated their organization's chain of command to rise to a position where they are responsible for proposing and meeting sustainability-related goals. Their corporate titles include: sustainability manager, director of sustainability, vice president of sustainability, principal environmental scientist, director sustainability stakeholder relations, and director of corporate social responsibility. You'll be hearing from a number of these members throughout this course and in others' courses that comprise the specialization. Today, I want to give you a feel for the lay of the land. As we lay the foundations for your becoming successful champions of sustainable change where you work and where you live, I've asked a few members of our advisory council to share their personal stories with you. That is, to tell us what their current roles involve, how and why they got interested in sustainability, and the path they took to get to the positions they hold today. Each person's story is unique; there are a lot of ways to get to the top. What they have in common is a passion for what they're doing and the ability to successfully implement change. Hi, I'm here with Graham Russell. Graham is associated with the Managing for Sustainability Program at the University of Colorado Denver. It's a long history in doing environmental management and sustainable business, one of the leaders, in fact, in the Denver, Colorado area. And, in particular, he's done a lot of work with the Colorado State Association for Recycling, and that's what we're going to focus on. But first I want Graham to talk a little bit about his background because it's really quite interesting. OK, well, my background was really in the corporate arena and I worked in the environmental services industry, specifically in environmental chemical testing laboratories. And that goes back quite a number of years to the point where the environmental regulations had just come out, and what you had was institutionalized conflict between industries that were being regulated and the regulators. And of course everything had to be tested, and it was a difficult arena but there wasn't much appreciation of the value by companies of being environmentally responsible until it dawned on them finally that if they did things right in the first place, then it would save them an awful lot of money in terms of legal cost and bad publicity and so on. And so, gradually, a sense emerged among the larger companies that it was worth their while to invest in being environmentally responsible consciously, as opposed to just doing the least that they could to comply with the regulations. And that was really, in many ways, the first sort of glimmers of what has now become sustainability. Hi, I'm here with an advisory council member, Christie Zimmerman. She is product standards for Natural Grocers. Christy, could you tell us a little bit about your background, what brought you to sustainability, and how you fueled your passion? Absolutely. My background varies; I've worked and lived in Latin America for a number of years working in education and working with agricultural companies, coffee companies, quinoa, llama farmers all over, and I also spent five years in Washington D.C. working in health policy, and then came to Colorado to do my MBA because I really saw the value in using the marketplace for sustainability, and being able to work in private and public sector but doing it through the market to be able to, in fact, affect the environment and social things that I'm really concerned and passionate about. And what's your job now? My job now is product standards manager for Natural Grocers which means I work in the purchasing arm of our corporate office, and we vet new companies and supply for new products, specifically I really focus on animal welfare and product standards. Hi, we're here with Jonathan Wachtel. He's the sustainability manager for the City of Lakewood. Lakewood's a beautiful town, just nestled next Denver here in Colorado. And we're going to be talking about his career, his initiatives, how he manages change. Jon, would you start out by just telling us a little bit about your career history, what motivated you, how did you get to your position today, what were some of the big things along in the path? So what you can tell our learners about how to be a director of sustainability for a city? Well, thanks, Ken, for including me in this and having me here. You know I got into sustainability at a municipal level over a long journey that started with a background in natural resources, and my undergraduate degree is in natural resource management. But what kind of happened over time was I realized that as you learn about ecological systems and how all of these, how everything works together, it's a lot comes down to how we use land and how we interact with the systems that bring us water, and provide materials and resources to our cities. And so that really got me intrigued about the urban fabric - how we grow, how we develop - and so I pursued a master's degree in urban planning, and started with the City of Lakewood doing comprehensive planning or long range planning that really looks at how a city will grow and develop and change over time, where the values are, what kind of services need to be provided, and so, inherently, that profession really is about sustainability. At the time that I started with the city, there was not a formal sustainability function. But bringing the environmental and conservation biology background that I had to the urban planning field, it was kind of a natural fit that there were a lot of, maybe, gaps in what we were looking at in terms of long-range planning - that really fit that sustainability. Brenna, can you tell me a little bit about how you got started, how did you find sustainability, how did you get a foothold, how did you get to the position you hold today? Of course, and thanks for having me here today, Ken. So I went to college at the University of Hawaii and, at that time, I knew I wanted to do something with sustainability and the environment; it had always been a passion of mine since a very young age. I grew up in Telluride, Colorado, and the value of nature and social equity was always instilled in me; so it was something that was baked into me as I grew up. And I knew I wanted to do something with sustainability, but I wasn't quite sure what yet. At that point, sustainability was a term, but it wasn't necessarily widely used, and it definitely was not in any curriculum in the schools. And so as I went through my college years, I ended up pursuing a Bachelor's of Science in hospitality management, which was a degree at the business school, and I was not necessarily fulfilled in my sustainability and environmental and social passions. So what I did was approach the School of Environmental Sciences, and I actually did an interdisciplinary study there with the business school and the School of Environmental Sciences to combine my passion of sustainability and of the environment with what I knew could be a marketable and successful career in business. So I did that for my undergraduate studies, and through that process I was able to do a series of internships with the Starwood Hotel and Resorts chain out in Hawaii. And, from that, I really started to develop a passion and a knowledge base for how to take sustainability concepts and apply them in the hospitality market for hotels, restaurants, and resorts. But I quickly learned that there weren't positions within hotels, restaurants, and resorts at a department level at an entry-level that would be able to fulfill those passions after I graduated. So I started really thinking deeply, you know, what could I do to make sure that, as I was progressing in my career, that it was something I could apply my passions for. So, you're saying is, there aren't sustainability directors in hospitality and hotel chains. Very few and far between. Later on in my career, I was I was able to create a role I thought for myself that was self-driven. Most of the positions in hospitality are gonna be at the corporate level or at the regional level; there's very few at the department or properties level. But there's a lot of opportunity to make sustainable changes and make meaningful changes even at the entry-level or? Most definitely, yes. And I think it really depends on the individual's initiative and how much they put forth their passion, and make those changes within their own leadership, within themselves. I got my bachelor's in business and marketing, and I started working with a lot of social enterprises where I became very passionate about having or helping businesses that wanted to do good. And so I was very intrigued by the one-for-one model, whether it was, you know, Toms Shoes or Warby Parker that could be making changes around community health or global health. And, so, that's when I decided to go back to school, get my master's of public health, to understand how companies could marriage the two, to understand how companies can truly be change agents and still make a profit and still do good and still have impact both at the community level as well as within their organizations. I had no idea what occupational health was when I went to get my degree in public health, but I see that that role practicing health in the workplace. You know, we spend more time at work than we do with our families, than we do sleeping, eating, anything else, and so I think that the workplace is probably the most significant place we can have change. You know, business truly is one of the greatest levers for change in our society, particularly as we sit within this time of political gridlock where making changes at a national level can be incredibly difficult, and we're thinking about some of the absolutely essential changes that need to happen in our society to get to a place where we have a really shared prosperity in the long term. Business really is one of the most effective, certainly one of the most nimble, tools that we have in that kind of long-term cultural shift. And business, in fact, has one of the greatest impacts; if we look across our economy, at all of the different ways that we create positive and negative impacts on our environment and on our communities, business really is one of the key sources of both negative and potential positive impacts. Business has the ability to impact people's lives in a way that oftentimes government and even nonprofit organizations can be pretty distanced from. In providing high quality jobs that provide meaning to people, in providing those pathways to community resiliency by really building a local economy, by, you know, sourcing from local suppliers, by partnering with other nonprofit organizations within the community or even nationally, we're really able to build those allegiances and those bridges that otherwise without businesses' support and without business really playing a key role, truthfully, I'm not sure how we're going to get there, how we're going to get to that place where we really do have a shared prosperity.
