Clients

Who’s the greenest of them all?

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Trick question—it’s me! Well, I’m the Greene-est, I guess.

But I’ve had the pleasure of making acquaintance with some other super-green folks lately: Eric Duchon and Akanksha Sharma, two of too-many-to-count members of the Urban Green Council, the New York chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council.

A building in NYC’s meatpacking district, ripe for an environmental retrofit! (courtesy Professor Bop, Flickr)

I started writing for Urban Green this past June and have been having a particularly good time with the member-profiling assignments.

Why? Because Urban Green members say the greenest, most interesting things!

EricEric:
“I’m always bumping into people on the street—not because I’m looking at my phone, but because I’m looking at buildings. ‘Are they doing a window replacement up there?’ I think to myself. Or, ‘Why are there so many halogen MR16s in this restaurant? Don’t they know there are incentives for LED bulbs that could save them so much energy?’ ”

Akanksha

Akanksha:
“Initially, sustainability is not the smoothest path in terms of career stability! It’s not like other career paths that go by the book. But there is a lot of room to innovate, and it’s engaging and rewarding because you have to drive yourself. You have to constantly recalibrate your approach so you’re attuned to what’s out there now.”

If I weren’t already happy with my job as a writer—and if I believed I had even a whit of the ingenuity, agility, and skill required—I’d consider endeavoring to join Eric and Akanksha’s esteemed ranks as city- and world-bettering Sustainability People.

As it is, I’ll just enjoy writing about them.

Cops, doughnuts, and the evolving streets of L.A.

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If you haven’t watched Locavesting founder Amy Cortese’s 2012 TEDxMaui talk, you might want to check it out. Amy is a longtime and award-winning journalist, book author, public speaker, and all-around very cool person, these days mostly focused on the topics of crowdfunding and community.

Locavesting

In 2011, she published Locavesting: The Revolution In Local Investing And How To Profit From It, which chronicles the local investing movement and explains how even small investment shifts away from multinational companies and toward locally-owned enterprises could reap enormous economic and social benefits for individuals, their communities, and the country.

Oh, and at around the five-minute mark of her TED talk, Amy tells the story of “the cops in Clare, Michigan that saved their town’s 111-year-old bakery—and revitalized their downtown in the process.” I’ll let her deliver most of the rich details, but can’t help letting you know that these guys renamed the place “Cops & Doughnuts” and started selling “Don’t Glaze Me, Bro!” t-shirts!

All of the above made me feel honored to write a story for the Locavesting website recently, about how Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti is partnering with national nonprofits like ioby and local orgs like the Ride On! Bike Coop to plan and fabricate L.A.’s next generation of more human-friendly city streets, using a fiscally-viable, community-led process. It’s inspiring stuff!

I invite you to read up, watch at your leisure, and invest locally. See you at the doughnut shop!

Cops and Donuts

What Trisha Brown calls the “bees going into your face” part

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In June, I had the pleasure of writing for one of my clients about BEEcosystem, a modular honeybee hive made for today’s urban lifestyles. It sits inside your apartment!! You let the bees out to frolic and pollinate through a tube. You have to see it; it’s great.

BEE

BEEcosystems at work in State College, PA

I interviewed the invention’s founders, awesome Pennsylvania dudes Mike Zaengle and Dustin Betz (I really do love Pennsylvania), and they had lots of interesting and important things to say about reestablishing our connection to the origins of our food, Colony Collapse Disorder, and how one in every three bites we eat was probably produced by a pollinator.

But what’s stuck in my mind most since then was Mike saying, “I had thought being outside in the yard with the BEEcosystem tube coming through the window might make me nervous, but after I worked with honeybees for a while, I realized they’re much friendlier than I thought. You can definitely walk around doing yard work all afternoon and they won’t bother you!”

Hot damn.

BEEcosystem is in the midst of a Kickstarter campaign to get this shizz off the ground. Throw a little dough their way, honey, and help grow the buzz!

Oh, and what was that about Trisha Brown at the beginning? It’s an all-but-unrelated quote (especially now that Mike’s weighed in about the bees not going into your face) from a wonderful interview with her by the inimitable M.J. Thompson—titled “Dancing? ‘It’s Awesome’ “—in one of my erstwhile stomping grounds, The Brooklyn Rail. I read it in 2009 and haven’t forgotten it. An excerpt:

Bob [Rauschenberg] and I were very close. I had the best dialogues with him. Bob had a fix on me like no one else. He called me at least once a week, especially when he was in New York, and said, “I’ve got an idea for you.” And I’d say, “Wait, I’m already working on the piece. Write it down, save it for me. And if you have another urge to talk to me call my office, it’s four in the morning.” He had a sterling vision [Thinking for a moment, then demonstrating: hands and arms cutting downwards quickly, away from her face]. Do you remember that part? What I call the “bees going into your face” part? I was working the edges of what was acceptable but at the same time the piece was a study in structuralism and scale and bees going into face.

Trisha

Love you, Trisha! (photo from artsalive.ca)

Teach a 20-something punk to write a good memo, and she’ll write good memos for life

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For a couple of fun, lucky years in my 20s, I worked as assistant to the director at the Asian Cultural Council (ACC), a grantmaking nonprofit that awards cultural exchange fellowships to artists and scholars from the U.S. and Asia.

Looking for a tear-jerker with great music? Look no further!

As well as being fun, the ACC is an extremely classy place, so not only did I get to attend the super-cool performances and openings of loads of top-shelf international artists, I also honed a grip of executive-level writing skills (first forged at ACC’s sister foundation, the venerable Trust for Mutual Understanding) that I find myself coming back to quite often as a full-time freelance provider of editorial services to nonprofits. Skills like:

  • ghostwriting correspondence and statements for a VIP
  • culling meeting notes down from chaos to the essentials
  • drafting invitations to donors that made giving us loads of money sound like a treat
  • and more!

This past spring, I was extremely stoked to see an email from ACC’s current director in my inbox. She said they had some writing and editing needs on the horizon, and wondered if I might be available to help. I couldn’t say yes fast enough.

Almost six months later, I’m still having a blast popping in on my old workmates in the office, reacquainting myself with all the great things they work on, and helping them craft communications—like this—that speak to the gravity and longevity (and yes, the fun) of what they do. (If you peruse that newsletter, check out the story about Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan. Definitely my favorite to write.)

You never know when an old skill—or old friends—will show up in your life again. But unless that skill is effectively squandering time or that friend is a psychotic clown, chances are you’ll be pleasantly surprised!

Join my networking cult?

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A couple of months ago, I got an invite from a friend-of-a-friend who was interested in forming a new North Brooklyn chapter of the business networking organization BNI. I had heard of BNI, but had (quite luckily and happily) always been too busy working to check it out.

However, this personal invitation grabbed me. I’d be founding a new group (fun professional development activity), with this friend-of-a-friend who I totally hit it off with (fun social activity), and would almost certainly gain some new business connections (fun $$$).

Ladies of BNI

The photo of our founding members I’m sending out with all my email invites. Who wouldn’t want to join us?!

But it turns out it’s a pretty long and involved process to get a group started, and as we go through the paces, I admit I’m experiencing bouts of cold feet.

Here’s a plusses and minuses rundown—maybe you can help me decide if I should continue?

Pros:

  • BNI has been around for 30ish years, is based on the who-could-argue-with-that? premise “Givers Gain,” and bazillions of business owners and sole proprietors around the world seem to swear by it.
  • Chapter groups’ weekly meetings are usually held in hilarious old-school diners (around here, anyway), so members can look forward to a hearty breakfast and bottomless cuppa joe with their fellows as they sharpen their elevator pitches and swap referrals.
  • There’s a whole lotta small business going on in North Brooklyn these days, with an especially hot injection of “creatives” in recent years. Business-swapping opportunities abound!

Cons:

  • Meetings are every week at 7:00 am. ’nuff said.
  • There are dues, to the tune of about $100 a month, all told.
  • Nine out of ten times I tell someone about BNI, they ask, “Is this a cult?”

So, dear readers, what do you think? Have you heard of BNI? What’s your impression? Had any experiences with it yourself? If you were me, what would you do?

When clients go to Mexico

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My dear friend and longtime client Elena is leaving NYC on a pre-dawn flight to Mexico tomorrow to embark on the 10-day silent meditation retreat that will usher in a bold new “oh-my-god-what-is-happening??” chapter of her life. I would say congratulations and good luck, but I don’t want to trip up her whole not-speaking thing.

Since we met a decade ago, I’ve known Elena by turns as a diligent, fair-minded, and hardworking coworker, partner in shenanigans, and small business proprietor. She thinks about almost everything deeply. She makes sumptuous vegetarian meals on the fly. Over the years, she’s handed down a grip of her classy clothing to me, which I hope made beautiful space in her closet with the same proportions as it filled the ghastly gaps in mine.

Elena

Recently, Elena decided to take an indefinite break from her glamorous Upper West Side life: she parked her baby blue Piaggio scooter in storage, sold most of her other belongings, and put her successful nutrition coaching practice on hiatus. Tomorrow, she’ll touch down in Mexico, and after that, it’s off to work on a veganic farm in the southwest. After that? I’m pretty sure she’d say your guess is as good as hers.

The fact that I realized today that I should probably retire Elena’s testimonial from my website (for now) is the least important part of this story, but it did make me want to tell it, so that’s cool.

Godspeed, Elena! You’ve got chutzpah, and I love ya. Just remember: Wild Women Don’t Sing the Blues.

And the cube goes to…

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Last week, I had the super-pleasure of attending the Urban Green Council‘s fourth annual EBie Awards (pronounced EE-bee!). These “Oscars of Existing Buildings” recognize improved environmental performance: measures that reduce energy consumption, efficiently use storm water runoff, improve indoor environmental quality to promote better human health, etc.

Please proceed to GOOD TIMES

I was there as a guest of the terrific designer (and my good friend) Claire Hansen and her equally inimitable husband Russell Unger, executive director of Urban Green, so the conversation over dinner was guaranteed to be good. But, to my delight, the merriment didn’t stop there.

The evening combined all the great things about classic awards shows—Broadway numbers, presenters ribbing presenters, and an open bar—with not-so-common actual importance: these people were being celebrated for saving millions of kilowatts of electricity, saving even more millions of gallons of water, and educating building owners, tenants, and visitors about their life-saving best practices. I’ll raise a Super Sap cube to that!

I covered the EBies for Urban Green’s blog, and I’m happy to report their communications crew was just as nice and fun to work with as I’d imagined. They organize and host great events all the time; I hope to hang out at and write about many more of them!

It’s a great time to be a grassroots fundraiser

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So says I! (And I didn’t even know about The Shins song until I wrote that and Googled it to see if it’s a thing.)

I recently wrote a blog post for my client and badass crowd-resourcing platform ioby that starts on this positive note. Call me a Pollyanna, but I just reread it on their website and was cheered to find I still believe it’s true.

Operation Tea Party Hard 80

I found this on Flickr when I searched for “grassroots” (Posted by Anonymous9000: “Brilliant handmade Rorschach mask with the scientology Cult’s Oak Cove building in the background”)

When our parents were our age, how did they raise money to build a new community garden, get a mural painted on an underpass wall, or start an after-school reading program? I’m sure, heroically, they organized bake sales, passed the hat at church, and put up fliers on lampposts.

All of that stuff is great (especially the bake sales), but today’s neighborhood leaders also have The Mighty Internet at their disposal, and the difference is night and day. Case in point: since its founding in 2009, ioby has helped 450 local improvement projects get off the ground with almost $1.5 million in crowdfunded cash.

This ain’t your mama’s Rice Krispies Treat (though, again, I love those, too)! Let’s hear it for the Internet and awesome orgs like ioby. Being a grassroots guy may never have been sweeter.

One of my clients was in Nepal when the first earthquake struck

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I am among the grateful that a wonderful client of mine, Scott Francisco, wasn’t harmed when the first of two magnitude 7+ earthquakes struck Nepal late last month, and that he was able to leave the country before the second one. I wrote this blog post about it for his design company.

Scott helps a family build a temporary shelter

Scott helps a family build a temporary shelter near Kathmandu

Although I haven’t been there yet, I’ve long harbored a certain (if vague) affection for Nepal, and I guess all things Himalayan. Watching the wreckage and misery that surround a disaster is always a souring experience, but in this case it felt worse than usual.

Scott is now in the midst of rallying other architects and structural engineers to volunteer some of their time and expertise to helping assess and rebuild homes and historic structures in the Kathmandu Valley. He’s a real mensch! Check out the details on this LinkedIn post.

Find a job you love and…

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Back in November, I interviewed my friend Eilon Paz about his photography book Dust & Grooves: Adventures in Record Collecting for Medium.

Dust and Grooves shout out

I’m reminded of it every few weeks, when Medium (thanks, guys!) sends me an email letting me know that more people have read and shared it.

The article was a ton of fun to “research” (on a bench in Red Hook on a sunny autumn day, with bags of candy), and to write, and it’s become probably the most-read thing I’ve ever published.

Maybe there’s a lesson in that?