What business has worked with 550 small and medium size businesses, 49,000 employees and saved 416,000 tonnes of C02? Answer: Climate Smart. https://climatesmartbusiness.com/
This week in the d.studio students were taken through a “short-form” of the training session that Climate Smart Businesses receive when they sign-up for the program that helps them lighten their footprints and save money. Elizabeth Sheehan (CEO) and Michelle Bonner (VP and Lead Trainer) took us through a thorough workshop to bring the students’ literacy up to par so they can work with the five businesses that Elizabeth has identified as “partners” in this project.
The Climate Smart Business training program is designed for busy entrepreneurs — it is a training program that includes group training workshops (3 x 1/2 days), One-on-One support, Online Tools and a Climate Smart Seal and network.
Given the Greenest City target of creating 20,000 new green jobs by 2020 and the greening of existing jobs, there is an urgency around getting companies on board. But what is really motivating companies to green themselves? There are a number of reasons: they want to differentiate themselves as leaders in their industry, they can see long-term cost reduction benefits, and they have pressure from employees — keeping talent is important. But they also want accurate, usable data for decision-making as well as help with behavioural change within their companies.
Reduction strategies focus on heat, transport, waste, behaviour change, capital equipment, and materials/waste diversion. 18% of businesses are tackling the activity where they have the biggest C02 impact. 1 in 5 are focussing on capital investment in heating equipment and 1 in 4 focus on capital investment in fleet replacement.
The first task for the students (and they had a practice run in the workshop) is to map the greening process for their business “partner”. What were the businesses like before the training? What did they take away from the training? How has the business changed practices since the training? What are their plans? In a sense, this “map” is building the platform from which you can work with your business to generate ideas and solutions.
The deliverable is a visual map of the business’ greening process. This map should serve both the purpose of communicating the student team’s learning to the rest of the class and to their business, but will also become a tool for the teams to analyze all of their learning to date. Thinking visually is a very powerful way of understanding what you know, and what you don’t know, and will help guide the students in this project moving forward. There are no restrictions on this – we have asked them to be creative!
The business partners for the student teams are: Met Fine Printers, Half Moon Yoga, Pacific Arbour Retirement, Van Houtte Coffee Service and Climate Smart Business themselves. Thanks to these businesses for their willingness to partner with the d.studio and our great students.