Session abstract:

The Women’s Healthy Environments Network is a grassroots organization with values rooted in collaboration, coalition and partnership.

The strength of this organization comes from its vigilant service to the community. WHEN is on the front lines of health issues such as cancer prevention, reproductive health and children’s neurological and respiratory conditions.

Access to community dialogue furthers the important work WHEN does with researchers and educators who develop and disseminate scientific and medical information which inform our policy makers to adopt sustainable and responsible practices.

WHEN leverages a series of traditional and contemporary business models to achieve its mission.

This session is intended to stimulate a discussion about:

- Health impacts of environmental toxicity
- Local Natural Resources
- Households
- Alternative Solutions
- How WHEN connects to Our Communities?
- The 4 P’s of Environmental Health Promotion

The session abstract:

The ‘green’ market is scattered and in many pieces. Thanks to popular culture it is easy for messages to be lost in the clutter of ‘green’. Sustainability as a practice faces many obstacles including established business habits, human behaviour anchored in non-sustainable activity, and competitive like-minded industry that make it difficult on the consumer to easily consume sustainable living products, services, and habits.

This session will open a discussion about using methods of collaboration to improve sustainable behaviour for the following three consumer types: the residential home owner, the high-rise developer, and the inner organizational evangelist who is looking to implement feasible sustainability in the workplace.

The session will use working case studies to showcase how collaboration implements sustainable behaviour for…

1) the consumer looking to navigate and understand sustainable culture for their home.
2) the industry that recognizes the benefits of implementing sustainable business practice to reduce footprint and positively effect profit margins
3) the individual who needs support and resources to create positive change in the workplace.

We want the showcase of these models to lead to a wider discussion amongst the group about using collaboration to clean up all ‘green’ messaging. What other sectors are facing the burden of ‘green’ clutter? How can collaboration positively effect consumer culture? What are the pros/cons for multiple brands to work together to promote themselves as a whole? How else can we stop the ‘greenwash’?

Steve Herzog is President of Greener Solutions Certified, a Toronto based sustainable living network focused on providing emerging sustainable technologies to a variety of industry.
Jason Eano is a Community Engagement Strategist for A Typical Collective, also out of Toronto.

Session abstract:

We are working on a visual framework to map systemic change - a global framework that can be (1) adapted to and inform local solutions-building and execution of social change initiatives, and (2) replicable across social change issues and world regions. This session would be a workshop where we would share the model and our work to date while actively exploring how and where it can be applied to sustainable development initiatives. Our aim is to provide value to all attendees while getting further insight and feedback on the model in progress.

Sean Howard and Lina Srivastava are recognized leaders in their respective fields with over 10 years of marketing and communications experience respectively. Sean brings a focus on digital engagement and Lina works on strategies for social change initatives. A few days prior to SusCamp, Sean and Lina will be working with leaders from design thinking, marketing and on-the-ground social change initiatives to craft the next pass at an evolving conceptual model for systemic change. This session will take place at Parsons in New York City.

Tom Williams of GiveMeaning.com opening keynote (not edited so brief intro to the day by Tamera Kremer of Wildfire Strategic Marketing is included)

Direct link to Google video original.

Enjoy!

More sessions from the 4th floor to follow during this coming week - stay tuned!

Feel free to pass along, share, or engage in discussions as well - let’s keep the conversation going!

The inaugural SustainabilityCamp was a smashing success thanks to the speakers, volunteers and participants who came out on a cold Sunday ready to collaborate and share! Lots of pictures & videos from the sessions still to come, but in the meantime, here’s a wrap-up of the initial digital feedback from the day…

If you led a session and have your presentation on SlideShare please let us know & we’ll add it in a subsequent blog post!

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Check out some of the new photos on the Flickr Group and add your own!

Live coverage of the day on Twitter

Blog posts & other resources from the sessions:

Continue the discussion from the Community Divas session

Mash-up of sus08 tweets (from Twitter) and Flickr photos from Community Divas

Terence Lo covers Tom Williams keynote

Mark Federman covers Ryan Taylor’s session

Mark Federman covers Tom Williams keynote

Mark Federman covers Lina Srivastava & Sean Howard’s session

Did you cover SusCamp? Add your blog post to the comments & we’ll highlight it here!

The 5 great books he’s willing to part with to 5 lucky attendees are:

• Saving The World at Work
• The Necessary Revolution
• Deep Economy
• Green To Gold
• Feeding The Future

Thanks Malcolm!

Update: It was awesome that one of the attendees decided to throw in a copy of their book - TheLittleGreenBook.ca as well during the drawing! Thanks!!

We’ll have 3 wifi channels available, and the signal strength will vary depending on where you are in the building, just choose which channel works - Wireless Toronto 1, 2 or 3

For those tweeting the event, the hashtag is: #sus08

If you’re blogging or uploading pictures or video, please use the tag “SusCamp08″

If you’d like to provide a link to your post in an aggregate location during the event please add it to the wiki “Event Coverage” page. We’ll do a round-up of coverage and post to the blog after the event.

If you’re uploading pictures, please feel free to add them to the SustainabilityCamp Flickr Group.

Finally, if you haven’t already, please join the Facebook Group and add any thoughts or posts from the day and keep in the loop on next years event!

We’ll also have 2 laptop charger stations set up behind the reception desk on the 4th floor (where we’ll be serving lunch) - not accessible from the street.

SustainabilityCamp.org

See you Sunday!

We’d like to sincerely thank SustainabilityCamp 2008’s Green level sponsor Zerofootprint for supporting the event this year & for being a leading force in educating the public in easy ways to reduce our carbon footprint.

About Zerofootprint:

The Zerofootprint group of companies empowers communities, businesses, and organizations to live ingeniously in a low carbon world. We do green.

The group is currently comprised of three distinct but related organizations: Zerofootprint Not-for-Profit, Zerofootprint Software and Zerofootprint Carbon.

Living green is about consuming less, sharing more and enjoying life. Offsetting is an interim measure that we use to deal with our ecological impact that is difficult to avoid. For example, if your business requires travel and travel is not yet “green”, what do you do? You offset the impact with real, tangible, additional benefits to the environment. Offsets in this way sets a price for the services the environment provides and that our economy doesn’t reward.

We’d like to sincerely thank SustainabilityCamp 2008’s Conservation (and In-kind) level sponsor Wildfire Strategic Marketing for founding & supporting the event & recognizing the need for sustainable practices in business!

About Wildfire Strategic Marketing:

Is your strategy working with you or against you?

Does your current agency really get who your consumers are and how they want to be engaged?

Are you integrating across multiple channels and targeting your message?

Do you leverage digital communications and social media when you need to?

Are you talking to your brand evangelists?

Is it getting harder to break through the clutter and sell more product?

… ignite your brand & engage your customers with innovate strategies and solutions that spread like wildfire.

innovate. integrate. ignite.

For those who have registered, expect an email with day-of details and information; speakers, same deal!

More details on the wiki!