Next Gen Green
Friday, June 24, 2011

You know those little plaques you can get with your baby's footprints? Or the paintings that kindergarten kids do with handprints that get slapped on the fridge until you realize that the hands aren't quite so small anymore? What about those shadow portraits of their profile in silhouette? All great keepsakes that parents treasure forever – or at least until you realize that you're overcome with keepsakes and start recycling. As parents, we love seeing the imprints of their little lives and how they grow.

My youngest son Carter (and forgotten middle child as he likes to call himself) graduated from Grade 8 last night. He is moving on from the school he has attended since the age of four when he entered Junior Kindergarten. Yes, I have the footprints, the handprints and the silhouette, but this kid did one better.

For at least the past five years, Carter said he would be Prime Minister of his school. He is pretty goal oriented this one, and sure enough, ran for "office" last fall and successfully became the big man on student's council. As he was writing his speech, I told him to think about what he would like to accomplish in the year and work backwards from there.

He said he wanted the school to be more environmentally friendly, and it became one of his platforms in his campaign. He wanted to "green" the school.

He investigated a program called Ontario ecoSchools (http://www.ontarioecoschools.org/) found a willing teacher to help him take on the task, formed the committee and took it from there.

On Wednesday, June 29th (appropriately my birthday) he will be accepting the "Silver" designation from Ontario ecoSchools. His school is the first elementary school in our district to reach this level in a first attempt. Last night at graduation, he was presented the Environment Award for initiating and successfully achieving this designation.

Proud? Um, yeah. Incredibly so. Have my green views rubbed off on my kids? I think I'd like to take a little credit but I will hold on to his handprints and let him enjoy his incredible accomplishment of reducing a school community's footprint.

Collaborators, Not Competitors
Saturday, October 30, 2010

If I can possibly identify what I love most about social media (the list is very long) I would have to say that it's the collaborative nature of the whole medium. I like and follow many members of the design and building industry on Facebook and Twitter, and I see this great sense of collaboration every minute – designers showing each other their latest new projects, retweeting a manufacturer's item about a new/improved or recommended product, praising each other for a well written or thought provoking blog post that would help them in their own design business.

Go back five years. How was this information shared? Was it? Did everyone work in isolation and swap stories a few times a year over cocktails at industry trade shows and conferences? This new model just has to be better.

The public relations profession has never been known for its great ability to share with other PR practitioners, especially if competition was involved. But now, I happily follow and share with other public relations consultants and look forward to giving and hearing about best practices. Can we credit social media and new realities of sharing information? I think so. The GreenEarth PR Network is a shining example of this. Eight PR pros from around North America sharing, learning and collaborating on a daily basis. Yes, we all deal in similar industries and anyone from the outside might look at us individually and think we are competitors. But that's not the case, and it's not the way we work. We work together to give our individual clients more knowledge, more experience and more ideas. It's our own social network that I feel I benefit from professionally and personally every day.

Like the industry that we serve, and the social engagement vehicles that have changed the PR industry forever, we embrace the spirit of collaboration and celebrate the relationships.