EcoDistrit Summit Recap: will it pencil out?

This week I attended the EcoDistricts Summit Tuesday and Wednesday of this week and I can’t tell you how many times I heard the phrase “it may be a good idea but will it pencil out.”  Coincidentally this week’s BGI topics centered on the bottom line and the metrics we use to evaluate a successful business’s bottom line. The EcoDistrict Summit experience has definitely  renewed my desire to not only understand personally the metrics for a projects or business financial success but also to continue to empower others to learn these tools and use to use them for good! The next paragraphs are a brief recap of the EcoDistricts Summit in context of the bottom line.

While I haven’t personally attended a lot of conferences I felt this one was pretty good. There was a diverse global representation of people, an engaging keynote speaker, a wide variety of professionals, and a pretty good diversity of topics and issues addressed in the breakout sessions. The Summit’s one weakness is the broad overarching topic itself: EcoDistrict but I’m not sure that can be helped.

EcoDistrict is loosely defined as an area that is more than one building but not more than a city sharing resources in the collective pursuit of sustainability. You can immediately see how this gets messy.  Sustainability is a complex idea; it is more than just protecting our natural resources it also includes fostering social equity and financial security for all.  On a building scale the ideas of sustainability are more focused on the environmental footprint of that building; example metrics/certifications include Living Building Challenge, LEED, Evergreen Standards, etc.  But when you move to the neighborhood scale a collection of LEED buildings does not automatically make a neighborhood sustainable.  We can all agree that if a neighborhood has social inequalities and financial disparities it is not sustainable.  The good news our human brain is capable of dealing with complex ideas and issues. This one is no different.  As I ranted about in my blog las week complex messy problems are the spark of innovation!

“Fix the cities fix the world.” This is maybe my favorite quote of the weekend. It represents this idea that if we can make changes for good in our own communities we make changes for good in our nation and our world.  We have to remember there is no cookie cutter option that can be applied to every city or every neighborhood. Each ‘district’ has to come up with what works for them socially, financially, and environmentally. At the summit we learned about some great Swedish examples of EcoDistricts planning and implementation.  Malmo’s Wester Harbour is one of their shining examples (http://www.malmo.se/English/Western-Harbour.html).  One fact I think is worth passing along is that Sweden has continued to increase their Gross National Product while reducing Carbon Emission. They've learned lessons and improved their technology and now share it through their special Swedish Sustainable brand SymbioCity (http://www.symbiocity.org/en/). It is both informative and inspiring, and I recommend checking it out.  But again, the big take away from their presentation is this is not a ‘plug and play’ way to build a sustainable neighborhood. Sweden has much higher energy prices and is an important trigger point to spur developers towards high energy efficiency. In the U.S. we need to get creative and find different triggers.  We need to find triggers that get us to the place where the bottom line still ‘pencils out.’ My opinion our trigger may be valuing the human and environmental capitol in the bottom line. If human and environmental capitol are valued upfront as investments in the project those investments will pay off later with financial rewards. But a few individuals need to think outside the box and take a few risk to prove to everyone this kind of bottom line thinking will pay off.

The keynote speaker at the conference Carol Colletta, executive director of ArtSpace, talked about place making. The top three things she listed that create place for people are (1) the social fabric, (2) the aesthetics of the place, and (3) it’s distinctiveness.  I want to take a moment to expand on her third point as it was a topic that came up a lot at the conference as a way to engage the community. Example after example project success depended on citizen involvement. Citizens felt more engaged when they had a sense of place and that sense of place was derived from something distinctive about their collective neighborhood.  One example given was a web platform that citizens could engage public agencies by posting what they thought should be done to enhance the city in different location. When the city acted on one of the unique ideas by adding a spray park to a neighborhood park it instantly became a place of pride for the neighborhood. It then spurred even more citizen involvement, continued funding and innovation in the neighborhood.

I was struck at the conference by a few participants who are still hoping for the magic bullet that will make their idea reality. This magic bullet is often either some public or private grant money. This type of waiting around hoping for funding is a function of the grantor/grantee system. It is not an empowering way to think about creating change. A great example of creating change that is not grant dependent is ioby.com. The co- founder of ioby.com, Erin Barnes, spoke at the conference and she shared some great examples of small demonstrative projects that got citizens excited about change and used crowd sources as a tool to start the momentum. I won’t go into examples here but again check it out (ioby.com) along with this great pdf guide about Tactical Urbanism (http://issuu.com/streetplanscollaborative/docs/tactical_urbanism_vol_2_final?mode=window&backgroundColor=%23222222). These are both powerful tools to get beyond the doom and gloom of ‘we have no funding, so I can’t make a change.’ Start small, demonstrate, and make a case for your idea by showing people exactly what is so awesome about your project!

Another speaker at the forum was Mark Edlen of Gerding Edlen, a Portland based developer company. Mr. Edlen said the formation of his company was based in his own personal ethic not about the profit.  In fact many of the decision his company has made over the years went against conventional wisdom but years after those decision were made they are considered the new standards. Today Gerding Edlen is a successful development company that is asked to participate in projects across the nation. I think this is a great example of the benefits Bob Willard talked about in his book The New Sustainability Advantage. It’s a company that is not only profitable because it manages risks, invests wisely but because its foundation is rooted in sustainable culture; their tag line is People-Prosperity-Planet.  As a private property developer they are truly benefiting from their sustainable advantage in all 7 of the advantages Willard addresses: (1) increased revenue and market share, (2) reduced energy expenses, (3) reduced waste expenses, (4) reduced material and water expenses, (5) increased employee productivity, (6) reduced hiring and attrition expenses, and (7) reduced risk.  I think Gerding Edlen is a great example of several innovative thinkers with passion and ethics  made it ‘pencil out.’

I think too often the saying ‘it just won’t pencil out’ is a cop out. It’s a way of saying, yes, that is a brilliant idea, but it is too hard to think about ways to make it happen.  Often as individual or communities groups with great ideas we can be talked out of our idea by someone the bank, grantor, financial consultant simply saying ‘it won’t pencil out.’ This is why we all need to take control over our own knowledge. If we have a basic understanding of bottom line metrics we can challenge the experts by pointing out non-traditional revenue streams and sustainable savings helping them realize that our brilliant idea will ‘totally pencil out!’ 

Whole Human & Whole Environment

Reading the NYT Reckoning Series over the last couple of weeks really set the stage for our first term here at BGI.  It seems our task is to begin to understand the current economic system and its influences over human interactions.  The NYT articles characterized the key players leading to the financial crisis as greedy and corrupt.  While I don’t explicitly disagree with this characterization I know the system encouraged and handsomely rewarded those willing to dive in and play the game.  It seems we could spend a long time playing the ‘blame game’  about what started and who contributed the most to the spiraling downward crash of the financial industry but really it just feels like another story about the Tragedy Of The Commons.

The problems of the financial industry are complex. Maybe even purposefully so. When I focus and try to understand even small parts of the financial system, with all its complex relationships and inner workings, I wonder how we will ever fix or change it. It’s overwhelming and I feel defeated before I even begin because I know so many people who are much smarter (or maybe just more motivated) are working to keep the system exactly how it is so they can get the most out of it before the rules change. How am I supposed to make a change for good when it’s such a big mess.

And then I pause. I take a deep breath. I find my voice. I don’t need to change the whole system rather I just need to follow my curiosity, explore the parts of the system that interest me, and maybe along the way find new inspiring ways of creating value to myself and my world. I’m inspired by Marjorie Kelly who says this in the forward of her book, Owning Our Future,  “It’s hard to talk about hope in these troubled times, but hope is what we are called to. My sense is that a new kind of economy-one that serves the many rather than the few, one that’s ecologically beneficial rather than harmful – is sprouting in little experiments here and there, in ways that weren’t possible before….A lot of us don’t see this, because we don’t believe good things might come from the messes we’re in.”

If I can be so indulge I’m going to go on a bit of a tangent, I guess it is my blog so here we go.. My tangent starts with those words of Marjorie Kelly about the future economic possibilities and how it rings true in my personal life. Like all of us I’ve created plenty of messes in my life that I had to figure out how to clean up (and I’m sure I will have plenty more).  But what is amazing about those messes is their capacity to teach me sometime useful. I may have learned something that helps me avoid a similar mess the next time around, or I learned some techniques to quickly clean up the mess, and sometimes I learned that the mess wasn't even a mess rather something amazing.  No matter what the outcome of the mess was I learned and I grew. Without those messes I would be the same person I was 15 years ago. That would be weird.  So I wrap up this mini rant to just say this: messes are part of life. We grow, we learn, and we innovate because we make messes. Our collective economic mess is an opportunity to do something different.

For those willing and eager to learn from our mistakes we have an opportunity to create new economic and social models. Studying our recent and even more distant economic history we will learn from our messy mistakes and create innovated new ideas.  Marjorie Kelly focuses on reconnecting each of us with economic ownership. As she says “Ownership is the underlying architecture of our economy.” What a simple yet empowering statement that provides so much room for a new generative economy!

Related to my musing over or recent economic history is Dr. Norm Becker’s Perspective on learning and adapting to our new economy in a recent blog called “What Have Economist Ever done for Us.”  He talked about how economists need to take some steps to learn from the messes they helped contribute in the recent financial crisis. He suggested two ideas: (1) making sure we learn the history and teach the history of economics and (2) move beyond old models of economic analysis. Today's economics are complex and require we look at them from multiple perspectives. As Andre Haldrew wrote in his recent blog “The construction and simulation of highly non-linear dynamics in systems of multiple equilibria represents unfamiliar territory for most economists. But this is not a journey into the unknown. Sociologists, physicists, ecologists, epidemiologists and anthropologists have for many years sought to understand just such systems. Following their footsteps will require a sense of academic adventure sadly absent in the pre-crisis period.”  

Creating innovate new economic models that take into account individuals as complex whole human beings as well as taking into account our whole environment  makes it a truly exciting time to be involved in business; we are the new economy.  

Related Links: 

Andre Haldrew’s Blog Article: http://www.voxeu.org/article/what-have-economists-ever-done-us

Dr. Beckers Article: http://abnormalecon.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-role-of-economics-in-financial.html

Hello BGI, Hello World!

My name is Domonique Juleon. I’m pursing my MBA at Bainbridge Graduate Institute with the goal of taking the next steps in my career. I’m passionate about food and food systems. I’m inspired by the way food connects each of us to our own health, our community, and our environment.  I was drawn to BGI because I feel that business will be a powerful tool of change and the specific BGI approach of sustainability will be a critical aspect of that change.

My undergraduate degree is in economics. I was not always the best economics student. I often struggled through the number crunching aspects of economics but I still found it a very interesting way to observe and interpret people’s behaviors.  I also love the big picture stuff and how the study of economics can reveal fascinating patterns in behavior.  I think it is this early education that brings me back to a business degree.  I never dreamed of being a banker as I pursued my economics undergraduate degree but rather I felt that economics was a solid foundation for understanding the world we operate in. I still believe economic studies to be a useful took but during my graduate studies I’m ready to challenge the status quo and shake it up.

I expect the coming year, actually two years, to be full of opportunities to see the world’s current struggles through a new lens, to learn new tools for change, and to inspire those around me to join in my journey in making our collective future a brighter one.