Darcy Winslow currently serves on the Board of Advisors for Greenopolis, an organization all about doing good.  Their goal is to provide you (the user) with information and tools to:

• Help you to recycle easily
• Help to save our natural resources for our children’s children
• Track conservation through recycling and re-use
• Educate and reward conservation

Darcy recently was asked to be a Pro-Blogger on their website!  Her first blog post, “Darcy’s Trip to Antarctica,” was all about recent trip this spring along with the 10 Things You Can Do from our website.

To read the blog post, please click here.

To learn more about Greenopolis and get involved, please click here.

For the 2008-2009 school year, Darcy Winslow served as an Executive-in-Residence and Senior Lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management.  She couldn’t get enough of Beantown and is back for the 2009-2010 school year and assisting with the Leadership Lab: Leading Sustainable Systems course with Wanda Orlikowski and Peter Senge.  The “L-Lab” is a unique course that blends traditional classroom learning, case studies, workshops, simulations, guest speakers, and projects developed in partnership with host companies.  The course culminates in Sloan’s hallmark Lab experience of a three-week on-site field engagement, during which students apply their systems thinking approach.

On October 22^nd, Darcy will be guest lecturing as part of the Fall Sloan Innovation Period, and again sharing her Sustainable Inspiration: Lessons from Antarctica presentation. During this session she will focus more deliberately on the student experience and how this expedition has shifted their studies and entrance into the business world. She will be joined by several of the MIT students who also joined the expedition.

Here’s to getting A’s (or 4.0), Darcy!

On Thursday, October 15, 2009 Darcy Winslow shared the 18 minute documentary about her trip to Antarctica with polar explorer Robert Swan, “Leadership on the Edge: 2041 and Antarctica.”  The event was hosted by the Portland State University chapter of Net Impact, an international organization for people interested in business and sustainability and the Center for Global Leadership in Sustainability.

The night’s conversations focused around the SustainAbility Institute’s C-LEARN module to be used this December at the upcoming U.N. Summit on Climate Change in Copenhagen.  Tyler Katzenberg, the Net Impact Chapter President at PSU, said that the goal of this event is to raise awareness of environmental issues and the upcoming Summit, as well as bring people together on the issue.

“It’s not just the U.S. signing on to the Kyoto Protocol but also about me turning down the thermostat and taking shorter showers,” said Nate Young, Vice President of PSU’s Net Impact Chapter.

DSW Collective was excited and inspired by the students who showed up to the event.  We are glad to see more people getting involved in global climate change issues and are looking forward to many more conversations with Net Impact.

To check out PSU’s Vanguard article on the event, please click here.

Involved with Net Impact anywhere?  Leave us a message letting us know!

Jim Ure, a participant at Go Green 09, emailed his reflections from Darcy Winslow’s panel “Eco-Visionaries: Creating the New Sustainable Business Landscape” to us at DSW Collective and we wanted to share them with our blog readers.

I thought the Eco-Visionaries panel as one of the most thought-provoking sessions of the day.  Your panel members [Sheri Flies, Costco, Sarah Severn, Nike and Joyce Lavalle, Interface] all brought good reflection and preparation.  Most importantly, all 4 of you used it as a forum to present ideas and models for action.  Your point that we have a lot to do and a long way to go was a welcome and appropriate message.

Some of the other observations Ure made included:

1. Leveraging market presence for change: Organizations can leverage their market presence to affect real business practice change with suppliers, competition and customers.  This was Ure’s biggest takeaway from the whole day.  The examples discussed showed results with real impacts (Costco & product pricing, Nike & competitors + Green exchange).
2. The power of ideas & their expression in mantras:  Mission Zero, Get off oil, Closed loop products, Eliminate VOCs, Paul Hawken and Ray Anderson.
3. Valuable Wisdom: We can only be as sustainable as our suppliers and our partners (Darcy Winslow).  If you don’t hit bumps, you aren’t going hard enough or fast enough (Darcy Winslow).  Stay true to your highest intentions (Sarah Severn).  Meet people where they are (Joyce LaValle).  The person who disagrees with you is your best teacher (Sheri Flies).

Thanks for sharing your thoughts Jim Ure!  Did you attend Go Green 09?  Post your thoughts below!

On October 7, 2009 the DSW Collective team (Darcy Winslow, Jenna Forstrom and Inbar Morag) attended Portland’s second annual GoGreen 09.  What a great turn out of dedicated people, all sharing the stories of what their organizations are doing in the field of sustainability.  Portland continues to set the bar high, as we heard from 2 members of the Eco-Visionaries panel, moderated by Darcy, who joined from Atlanta and Seattle.  Did you know that Portlanders drive 4% less than the average city dwellers nationwide?

Darcy Winslow led a panel called “Eco-Visionaries: Creating the New Sustainable Business Landscape” which featured some close friends: Sarah Severn (Nike), Joyce LaValle (Interface) and Sheri Flies (Costco).  There were some great take-a-ways from this panel, including:

• A new reading list, check out DSW’s recommendations here.
• Interface’s Seven Step Plan towards sustainability; Interface plans on being “off oil” by 2020. For more information check out MissionZero.org.
• “Systemic change happens only through seemingly insignificant shifts in habit.” – Molly Baldwin, ROCA.
• Sarah Severn stated “We have the technology, we need the political will power now” around climate change to make a difference.
• Right now the average US citizen lives approximately a 19-ton/year carbon lifestyle. Scientists estimate that if we are to stabilize atmospheric CO2 at a safe level, the global population would need to average 2-ton/year carbon lifestyle.  What would that look like?

When asked what their personal piece of advice would be to those in the audience these ladies said:

“Stay true to your highest intention,” Sarah Severn.

“Meet people where they are,” Sheri Flies.

“Way more collaboration,” Joyce LaValle.

“Check your ego at the door,” Darcy Winslow.

We loved the other panels as well.  Our team checked out the 2009 Most Sustainable Business Showcase.  Elephants, Sokol Blosser Winery, EPSON and Refind Furniture are all local companies making positive impacts.  Scouted the competition in Improving Your Sustainability Credentials, where our friends Carrie Farrar and Mike Mercer were panelists.  Listened to James Curleigh’s “give a hoot, don’t pollute” mantra in Writing Your Sustainability Plan.  Researched our Carbon Footprint Analysis.  And learned about Social Media and Your Sustainable Message, got DSW Collective on Twitter now!  (Follow us @DSWCollective).

Did you attend Go Green 09?  Let us know what you thought of the conference!