Collective Impact - How to Collaborate for Positive Change

How many Harvard graduates does it take to change a light bulb?  The former director of Harvard’s sustainability office had direct experience in answering this question when implementing lighting retrofits on campus.  She calculated it took somewhere over 40 people to make it happen, when it was all said and done. 

This isn't surprising.  Creating a sustainable society is complex.  And it will require people, communities and organizations from all parts of our global society to work together towards this common goal.  To do so, everyone involved needs  - at a certain level - to share this goal.  We don't all need to agree on the details of the goal, nor do we all need to agree on exactly how to take each step towards getting there.  But we do need a shared understanding of the system we're operating in and the principles we can all agree on.

Image credit: NASA Goddard

One of the basic tenets behind Strategic Sustainable Development (SSD) is that groups of more than 5 are typically dumber than the dumbest member of the group, but that with a shared framework and a common language and common goal, a group working effectively together can be much smarter than the smartest member of the group.

The Framework for SSD provides a common goal - defining sustainability on the principle level - and common language and techniques for large groups, and cross-sector groups to work together effectively.

A recent paper by John Kani and Mark Kramer in the Stanford Social Innovation Review titled Collective Impact does a great job of articulating the need for collaboration across traditional boundaries to enact change and provides some exciting examples of groups that have been successful in doing so.  

The authors lay out five conditions for collective success:

1. Common Agenda - a shared vision for change among the participants 
2. Shared Measurement Systems - agreement on ways to measure and report progress
3. Mutually Reinforcing Activities - alignment so different participants are doing different activities that in sum support the common goals
4. Continuous Communication - regular meetings and conversations are necessary to build trust and understanding
5. Backbone Support Organization - a separate organization and staff to support the collective effort and serve as the backbone for the initiative

When the task at hand is creating a sustainable global society - or creating a sustainable organization (i.e. an organization that has eliminated its contributions to unsustainable activities) - the Framework for SSD is one of the most effective tools for articulating the common agenda and creating shared measurement systems and identifying mutually support activities.  From there continuous communications are a must as are people dedicated to the constant coordination and support for this type of transformational change. 

When this works, amazing things can happen. Innovative ideas, solutions and new products are created.  Team members get excited and passionate about their work.  Risks and waste are avoided. 

It is not easy, but it is necessary avoid a collapse of human society, and it can be fun. 

Stay going. 

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New Report Shows Bold College & University Action on Climate Disruption Provides Model for Governments

March 23, 2010 Press Release from Second Nature

While the US government and the global community have been slow to address severe climate disruption, colleges and universities are stepping in to boldly slash their carbon emissions, research and develop new technologies, and prepare students to create a safer, clean energy economy.

According to a new annual report (PDF) released today by the American College & University Presidents' Climate Commitment (ACUPCC), the participating schools are working to cut a combined estimated 33+ million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year. The ACUPCC, launched in early 2007, is currently comprised of 677 schools in all 50 states and the District of Columbia - representing nearly six million students and about one third of the US higher education student population.

David Shi, President of Furman University and Co-Chair of the ACUPCC, noted, "Sustainability is one of the few enterprises that fosters collaboration among institutions. That so many schools have embraced the climate commitment is unprecedented. Such bold action on such a broad scale provides a model for the rest of society to emulate."

Recently, more than 300,000 individuals called their Senators as part of a coordinated effort promoted by dozens of advocacy groups urging the US government to pass comprehensive climate legislation. But the higher education sector is not waiting for uncertain government action.

ACUPCC schools, growing in numbers each month, have conducted greenhouse gas inventories and developed comprehensive climate action plans for their own institutions. Their bold commitments are voluntary and transparent, with public reporting submitted to the ACUPCC online Reporting System. The higher education sector is the first in society to substantially pursue climate neutrality.

Colleges & Universities Slashing Carbon Emissions
According to the new ACUPCC report, 66% of the participating ACUPCC schools have determined that they will reach climate neutrality in their campus operations by or well before 2050. Relative to its 2005 baseline, the University of Florida is working to reduce emissions 3% by 2012, 17% by 2020, 42% by 2030, and 83% by 2050. The University plans to achieve climate neutrality in 2025 using carbon offsets, while continuing to reduce its internal emissions each year thereafter. The University of Wyoming is reducing emissions 15% by 2015, 25% by 2020, and 100% by 2050. Its plan incorporates behavior change, facility upgrades, and long-term infrastructure and alternative energy projects in line with Wyoming's position as an energy-producing state.

In 2007, College of the Atlantic in Maine became the first higher education institution in the US to achieve carbon neutrality. All of the school's electricity comes from renewable sources. By purchasing locally and reducing travel, the college has cut its actual emissions by about 40% over the last three years and has purchased offsets to reach "NetZero" with a plan to continue reducing its direct emissions and thereby the amount of offsets purchased over the long term.

Students Learning How to Address Climate Disruption
Central to the ACUPCC are efforts to ensure that all graduates are equipped to help society address climate and sustainability in their personal and professional lives. Wilson Community College in North Carolina offers a certificate program in home weatherization and features the use of a carbon footprint calculator in a required course. Georgia Institute of Technology's Center for Biologically Inspired Designs is conducting a research project, informed by research on honeybee colonies, on more efficient Internet hosting. Santa Fe Community College offers a solar energy certificate program through which students acquire the skills they need to find jobs in the solar and green building sectors. The Gund Institute of Ecological Economics at the University of Vermont is examining the relationships among ecological, political, and economic systems and whether the Genuine Progress Indicator is a better metric than Gross Domestic Product.

Working Beyond the Campus Gates
At Ball State University in Indiana, students and faculty recently researched and developed a new model for sustainable neighborhood renewal in Indianapolis. This Smart Growth Renewal District has been selected as one of five pilot projects in the nation to be supported by the Office of Sustainable Communities, a new collaboration among the EPA and the federal Departments of Transportation and Housing & Urban Development.

Villanova University students are designing and constructing schools, water supply systems, and small-scale electrification projects using renewable resources, together with partners in Kenya, Thailand, Nicaragua, and Honduras. A group of Green Mountain College faculty and students are looking for potential sites for solar, hydroelectric, wind, and geothermal energy in Poultney, Vermont, with the intent of creating a community energy plan for the town.

Cognizant of the significant impacts associated with the manufacture, use, and disposal of products, the University of Arkansas has partnered with Arizona State University to launch the Sustainability Consortium, which will determine a way to clearly and consistently measure product sustainability. The program, in collaboration with various NGOs and government partners, is funded by major manufacturers and retailers. Said University of Arkansas Chancellor and ACUPCC signatory G. David Gearhart, "We are excited to be involved in this ground breaking work that will change the way business is done around the world."

Many more examples of new innovative climate- and sustainability-related activities by colleges and universities are featured in the new ACUPCC Annual Report available online (PDF).

About the American College and University Presidents' Climate Commitment
The American College and University Presidents' Climate Commitment, a high-visibility effort to address global warming, garners institutional commitments to neutralize greenhouse gas emissions and accelerate the research and educational efforts of higher education to equip society to re-stabilize the earth's climate. The ACUPCC is led by a Steering Committee comprised of more than 20 university and college presidents and is hosted and staffed by Second Nature, a Boston-based national nonprofit organization, with additional support provided by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education. ecoAmerica, a third founding supporting organization, contributed to the production of the 2009 ACUPCC annual report. More information athttp://www.presidentsclimatecommitment.org.

C-ROADS less taken...

Speaking of Hopenhagen - you want some hope?? Check out this new TED talk from (fellow Dartmouth alum!) Drew Jones of the Sustainability Institute. This is the kind of way we need to be thinking - acknowledging the danger of potential "Business as Usual" emissions scenarios, and then immediately recognizing that those are not a pre-determined future, and that we must mobilize immediately and in a big way if we're even going to get close to achieving atmospheric concentrations of 350 ppm in a meaningful timescale. Enjoy, (and learn more at the Climate Interactive Blog):

Stay going.

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Karl-Henrik Robert - from cancer research to strategic sustainable development

A quick clip from Karl-Henrik, going through his story of moving from cancer research upstream into strategic sustainable development leadership... about how and why people work together and help each other when they know life is on the line:



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Sustainability Strategy for Cities

To quickly follow-up on a rather gloomy reality-check out of Australia, I'd like to get right back to a strategic, solutions-oriented approach to sustainability, and highlight what sounds like a great webcast coming up on Thursday (Apr. 16, 2009) about developing strategies at the city and county level.

This event - and a strategic approach to sustainability generally, jibes nicely with a great piece I just read about "rants" - and how they can help us break from problematic trajectories we're on and create the future we want.

Have a read, and check out the webcast Thursday, they've got an excellent line-up of speakers, and it's free, you just need to register - here are the details:


"Creating Your Most Effective Sustainability Strategy: What Cities and Counties Can Do"April 16, 2009, from 1 - 2:30 pm (EDT)

~Harvard online event. Pre-registration required, and free of charge.~

This online event, cosponsored by greenerApplications and Harvard’s Government Innovators Network, will enable city- and county-level executives and policy-makers to create highly effective sustainability strategies. The panel will offer a full spectrum review of the latest tools and policies your jurisdiction can use to lower greenhouse gas emissions and implement low-risk energy cost saving projects.

* Gerry DeSeve (moderator) - President of greenerApplications
* Michelle Moore - Senior Vice President, Policy & Public Affairs, U.S. Green Building Council
* Missy Stults - Senior Program Officer ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability
* David Smith - CEO, Princeton Energy Systems, Inc.

For more information and to pre-register for this event, visit our event page.

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BTH is WorldChanging

A much appreciated colleague and friend, Andrew Outhwaite recently published on WorldChanging some reflections from Hallbarhet - the Australian (and affiliated regional events) sustainability conference / MSLS reunion. The piece focuses on social technologies for moving us more effectively towards sustainability. The importance of community and more effective ways of communicating and working together are central to effective sustainable development. (As Tony Cortese likes to say, "communication in sustainability work is like location in real estate. Communication, communication, communication." Andrew is excellent at studying, understanding, and practicing these tool, techniques and technologies. A quote from the WorldChanging piece:

We are now a global village whether we like it or not, with no enemy except the momentum of our unsustainable culture and the forces of nature we have unleashed. Though individuals need to act strategically, authentically and boldly, acting in isolation is not enough to survive and realise our evolutionary potential. A shift in focus from individual heroes to mass collaborative leadership and action is required, and that shift will challenge our attachment to our primary identities as independent, autonomous actors.

It seems more important than ever to remember that sustainability is not the characteristic of one individual, organisation or nation; rather, it is the result of the whole system. The ultimate challenge for leaders in this space is to push the edges of what we can and must do together, as a community.

The ACUPCC is a great example of the need for these kind of 'technology' - presidents have performed a great act of leadership by signing, and now are faced with the challenge of following-through - which will take ongoing, persistent, dedicated leadership to enable and empower their communities to incorporate sustainability principles into the educaitonal experience of all students, and transform their campuses into climate neutral role models for society. At Second Nature we get a lot of "how to" questions from all kinds of people on ACUPCC questions - they tend to be cloaked in technical questions - about solar power or energy efficiency - but they are really community questions - about how to engage with members of the facilities department, or work with business officiers to employ a 'true cost' economic analysis to investment decisions. It is the most exciting and challenging aspect of sustainability work and too often buried under the converstaions about technological performance and top-down policy decisions.

For more of Andrew's writing and work, see his Arising website.

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The Invention of Air

This is a great book. It's only a couple of hundred pages and I just couldn't put it down. As M says, it's basically about all of my favorite things - systems thinking, transdisciplinarity, the American Revolution, founding fathers, scientific revolution. And the author Steve Johnson is great. I've only read one of his other books (Emergence) and it was awesome as well - really a must read. Putting my biases aside, I don't know if I'd say Invention is a must read, but if you're into that sort of thing, it's definitely a great read.

The book is about Joesph Priestly - a British "natural philosopher" (scientists of the day), around the time of the Revolution, and big buddies with Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, etc. He did a ton of experiments and is often credited with 'discovering' oxygen. He isolated it first, but was kind of off in interpreting what it was, so others rounded out the discovery and named the gas. But he also basically discovered that plants give off oxygen - through very cool experiments with sprigs of mint in jars that were able to live on, while candles in jars went out, and mice died without the plants. Piecing it together with Franklin, they opened the door for the ecosystems view of the planet (though they didn't articulate it in the way we understand it today). But that process - photosynthesis, driven by solar power - the 'engine' of nature - is central to understanding the "System" level of the framework for SSD, and what makes a sustainable society. And so it's very cool to trace it back to such a key discovery, and such a key moment.

Also very cool is how the book draws out how those types of moments don't happen in isolation. The context, the interactions, the chance that lead to big changes are all crucial. And tracing Priestly through his interactions and escapades is a great way to demonstrate that. The stories about his engagement with 'societies' in London and other places he lived are great. The main one, where he got his start and met Franklin is the Honest Whigs - where they would come together on a regular basis in some pub, have a big meal and few pints and share ideas, compare notes, report back on experiments, and drive the revolution in thought that was occuring. This was a rather effective motivator for finally getting a Green Drinks chapter going here in Gloucester.

The information networks that these types of meetings, plus the great letters of the day, and the papers, created were also critical to big evolutionary leap that took place around the time. And there are parrallels, of course to today. The chages we are faced with are unprecedented, but in many ways the principles are very similar to those in any kind of big shift in a system. The openness of information and sharing of ideas got Priestly in a lot of trouble, but also got his ideas out there for others to improve upon, and consequently improve quality of life, and take us into a new chapter in our cultural evolution. The internet and mobile devices are obviously helping to drive similar dynamics today.

Priestly also shook things up in the spiritual realm, essentially founding of Unitarianism, and providing a view of Christianity that Jefferson credits with keeping him from having to abandon it all togehter. The crossing of disciplines with ease (far more common before the rigid disciplines and specializations of the modern university changed the way we view the world) is a central theme, and again resonates with the sustainability movement, as we see growth in the interrelated areas of spiritual exploration, evolving consciouness and the like.

In making this leap, the stakes are of course a bit higher. It's not the King of England and the church establishment we're facing down, it's the potential for the collapse of civilization. The good news is we're driving the mechanisms responsible for that potential, so it's really us we're facing down, and thus very much within our power to gear up and dramatically rethink and redesign how we go about our business. We've just got to get together and do it - and luckily the upswell of awareness and engagement continues to grow. Stay going.

Education for a Green Economy

Here's an exciting piece co-authored by many of our colleagues working in the education for sustainability movement. The shift in language is I think a good one, "green economy" probably makes a lot more intuitive sense to a lot of people than does "sustainability" ... a green economy of course is not just about the environment - the trees and owls - but about people meeting their needs. Some might say "green/blue" to make that more explicit - but the social and environmental aspects of all of this are so interrelated that they are indeed one in the same.

Education is too often overlooked in these matters, yet it is vitally important - it shapes our thought and patterns of thought that create our unsustainable systems (and then say "we didn't do it, there's nothing we can do about it"). This is key both for the immediate-term green jobs training, particularly in our community colleges, but also in all disciplines and throughout our education systems to breakout of these thought-traps and create sustainable systems - economic, infrastructure, social, energy, engineering, building, health, transportation, monetary - all kinds of systems.

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OPINION: Letter to the New Education Secretary

by Worldwatch Institute on December 19, 2008

Worldwatch is pleased to publish this open letter from prominent education and environment leaders urging the newly nominated U.S. education secretary, Arne Duncan, to consider the importance of education in carrying out President-elect Barack Obama's environmental agenda.

Dear Mr. Duncan:

Congratulations on your nomination. As you jump into the daunting challenge of bolstering our sagging education system, you have a powerful opportunity presented by the need to create a carbon-free economy.

President-elect Obama has astutely perceived the linkages between climate change, economic stimulus, energy security, and job training by declaring that the transition to a green economy is his "top priority." The missing link in this system is the critical role that education can play in quickly making the green economy a reality. By working with him to include a major role for education in his green economy plans, you'll help advance his agenda - and yours.

Transforming our nation's economic, energy, and environmental systems to move toward a green economy will require a level of expertise, innovation, and cooperative effort unseen since the 1940s to meet the challenges involved... Read the rest at the Worldwatch site.

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ASU Sustainability Summit

I highly recommend checking out the free video feed of the Arizona State University Sustainability Summit that took place this morning in DC. It's an hour and a half long, but well worth it (and if you stick it out you'll be able to see my bride use her brand new last name when asking a question :) There's a great line up including Bill Ford (Ford Chairman), Rob Walton (Wal-Mart Chairman), Michael Crow (ASU President), US Rep Ed Markey (D-MA), Governor Tim Pawlenty (R-MN), US Rep Fred Upton (R-MI), and our boss Tony Cortese. Very exciting to see a cross-sector dialogue happening around the big issue of sustainability:

http://www.asu.edu/vppa/sustainabilitysummit/index.html

Stay going...