Corporate & Professional Development

How To Green Your Business and Other OrganizationsNEW COURSE

Businesses and institutions improve their environmental performance to reduce costs, attract customers, and help sustain our ecosystem. This course provides you with the background and understanding necessary to achieve these goals.

The course is divided into three sections:

  • The context for greening your organizations: the major environmental issues of our lifetime, including climate change, looming water shortages, ocean degradation, and the accumulation of synthetic chemicals in the environment. You will also study a topic of your own choosing.
  • How to live a more environmentally-friendly lifestyle. This knowledge will provide you with the standing and the framework to green your organizations.
  • Why it is important to green your business, and how to go about it.

The course includes a field trip to a business that has become a green leader in its field, and has improved its bottom line as a result. You will learn what the organization did, how it overcame obstacles to success and how it benefits from going green. We will have a conversation with the business’s environmental champion.

When you successfully complete this course, you will receive 2.7 Continuing Education Units (CEUs).

Learning Outcomes

  • Comprehend the major environmental issues that we face in our lifetime and how they relate to your organization.
  • Gain experience in reducing energy use, water use, garbage and toxic products in your own life.
  • Find out how environmental improvement provides an advantage for businesses, and how to communicate those benefits to management, staff, and customers.
  • Discover what leading organizations in various sectors are doing to improve their environmental performance.
  • Learn how to develop a plan to green your business, how to gain support for it, how to fund it, and how to implement it.

Instructor: Dan Ruben

dan_ruben@usa.net

Dan Ruben is the executive director of Boston Green Tourism, a catalyst for expanding the use of environmentally friendly practices in Greater Boston’s hotels and convention centers. Previously, Dan was the executive director of the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Conventions (CERC), which planned, implemented, and publicized environmental best practices at the 2004 Democratic and Republican National Conventions. CERC won the international Environmentally Responsible Meeting Award, two EPA Environmental Merit awards, and Mass Energy’s Advocate of the Year award. Dan advised the City of Denver about greening the 2008 Democratic National Convention.

Dan served for 8 years as Vice President and President of the Green Decade Coalition/Newton, a grassroots volunteer environmental non-profit, and currently serves as a board member. The Green Decade works with households, businesses, schools and institutions in Newton to implement measurable improvements in their use of resources.

Dan is the Vice President of the Board of Directors for the Massachusetts Energy Consumers Alliance and is on the Advisory Council of the Sustainable Business Network of Greater Boston. He has been a consultant for the Environmental Protection Agency, Cotton Incorporated, Clear Channel Communications, Pioneer Investments, the Down to Earth Expo and the Energy Smackdown television show.