Sustainability 202 for Government: Taking Action to the Next Level

June 14-15, 2006 from 9am – 5pm both days

Audubon Habitat Education Center and Wildlife Sanctuary, Belmont, MA

"Give us your tired poor budgets, your huddled, embattled servants yearning to breathe free of short-term, first cost idiocy. We light a lamp beside a golden door.”

-with apologies to Emma Lazarus.

For a print-friendly 1-page overview, click here.

For a brochure on our entire seminar series, click here.

This 2-day advanced intensive is for experienced practitioners ready for the next level of leadership. You already understand sustainability, and the pressing need for action in our rapidly changing world. Now you can build new relationships with other veterans, and materially strengthen the skills and knowledge you’ll need to be highly effective in your career, your community, and your agency. The advanced curriculum includes:

Day 1:

• Sustainability and Massive Change : Unprecedented environmental and social trends mean the near future may be radically different than we normally imagine. Together we’ll explore life-changing global shifts, and discuss how to take advantage of innovative future-oriented responses emerging here and around the world. How can your work align with such sweeping forces? What structural changes would make your work more effective, and how can you move these forward?
  
• Building High-Leverage Buy-in : Raise your skill in advanced strategic questioning, map strategies for your situation, practice through role plays, and examine a live case study with Dan Ruben, Exec. Director, Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Conventions. We’ll explore key questions and lessons learned from greening Boston hotels and the Democratic and Republican National Conventions.

Strategic questions are open, engaging, and invite further learning. They make people say, “Wow, that’s a great question, I’ll have to think about that!” and help turn “You should…” into “How might we..?” To learn more about them, click here. We’ll spend time getting you beyond the initial framing of strategic questions and into the nuts, bolts and nuances of who should ask whom, when, where.

Day 2:

• Green Finance Practicum: Together we’ll re-engineer project budgets, examine green procurement case studies, and look at the real financials of green buildings. You’ll learn how to calculate net present value of “green” line items, internal rates of return, and life cycle costs, and will be well prepared to apply this learning to your situation. Our guest teacher will be Don Fudge, leading green finance and green school construction expert, and Director of Training and Education with the Northeast Energy Efficiency Partnerships.
  
• How to Create Highly Effective Sustainability Teams : Adopting sustainable strategies requires effective cross-functional teamwork. Learn the 5 stages effective teams go through, assess your group’s development using a special confidential questionnaire, figure out what to do (and not do) to enhance it’s performance, and the six special challenges faced by teams working towards sustainability.

You’ll get a thorough introduction to the science of effective teamwork, a roadmap that removes 99% of the guesswork in helping your team really fly. SSNE has taken over 30 years of groundbreaking research into effective work teams, overlaid this with principles and practices of sustainability efforts to uncover striking new insights about the barriers and opportunities such efforts face.

Both Days: SSNE’s Sustainability Clinic: Participant Readiness Assessments, Case-Based Problem Solving and Action Planning :Work in small groups and with workshop leaders to address your professional and organizational readiness, and gain insights on key issues. Our unique “Search for Insight™” process combines hundreds of years of the trainers’ and participants’ experiences with powerful strategic questioning to reveal the key questions and provide the high leverage resources you need.

Without exaggeration, if you registered to get these five content areas elsewhere (if you can even find ‘em), you'd spend many days traveling, spend well over $2000, much of it wouldn’t be embedded in the larger sustainability context, and you’d be unlikely to get the personal attention we've designed into this intensive.

Won't you join us, for a mere $440 for two very full days? If your organization won’t spring for it, we’d like to ask you to invest in yourself. What might be its value to your career, your community and your household?

If you need still more reasons to attend, click here.

To Register and Apply*:

Register here and then send an email giving BRIEF answers to just four questions:

* Where do you work and in what capacity?

* How long have you been working to advance sustainable practices, and in what ways?

* What have been one or two of your key successes and challenges?

* What would make this intensive especially useful?

We’ll let you know about acceptance within 5 business days.

We suggest you register now.
To insure close personal attention, space is limited!
Early registration ends June 1, 2006.

*To be comfortable at this event, at least some of the following acronyms and terms should familiar to you:

Natural Step framework, ecological footprint, ICLEI, cradle to cradle, life cycle analysis, ROI, environmental justice, systems thinking, LEED, environmental management systems

To download a Seminar Series brochure and registration form, click here.

To learn about the presenters, Paul Lipke and Beth Tener, click here.