Yesterday I had the amazing opportunity to attend the annual Pachamama Alliance fundraiser at Fort Mason in San Francisco (along with 1,500 of my closest friends!). If you’re not familiar with the Pachamama Alliance, you have to check them out.
The Pachamama Alliance is an incredible organization with a two-fold mission:

To empower indigenous people of the Amazon rainforest to [...]

This past week I was fortunate to attend a West Coast Sustainability Summit hosted by the Women’s Network for a Sustainable Future.
WNSF is a national association of women professionals who are passionate about integrating sustainability principles into their organizations and businesses.
This year’s second annual West Coast Businesswomen’s Sustainability Summit, hosted by IBM at the company’s [...]

Often when we talk about corporate social responsibility, we assume people are talking about “the big dogs” – companies like Proctor and Gamble, Nestle, Coca-Cola, and of course Walmart.
And certainly these powerhouses dictate a lot of what gets discussed, watched, and measured, if only because of their sheer scale and impact on the global business community.
But [...]

Have you ever heard of a book called Eats, Shoots and Leaves?
The premise of the book, by author Lynne Truss, is to “remind readers of the importance of punctuation.”
The book’s title comes from a (potentially bad) joke on punctuation:
A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and [...]

This time last year I was just starting a week-long intensive MBA course on Global Sustainability.
The class – which covered everything from green technology innovation to social entrepreneurship – really focused on three distinct environmental challenges: Food, Water and Energy.
If there was one major takeaway from that week of class, it’s that these three issues are inextricably linked. [...]

Things have been a little light on The Changebase recently, as I’ve traded my school books and CSR projects for cardboard boxes and packing tape.
Yep, the Jablows are leaving Boston and heading back to the San Francisco Bay Area, where we’ll both be based while we look for jobs and get settled again on the [...]

Let’s face it: sustainability can be a challenging topic for many people to understand.
For example, when you hear someone on the news or in business talk about alternative energy or cap and trade policy, can you honestly say you understand it all?
I’ll go out on a limb and admit that when I hear the word [...]

How many of you have heard of Fair Trade? I’d imagine many of you have.
But how many could actually define it, or discuss it, or even promote it? My guess is not as many.
That was the case for me until recently. Recognizing that I’d heard a lot about Fair Trade but that I couldn’t actually [...]

I’ve written before on The Changebase about my own journey to find sustainable, local food – including this post on defining what local food really is.
The big conclusion I reached after trying to define “local” was that what I really meant was eating seasonal.
By eating seasonally, we get a couple of benefits:

Food tastes better: Anyone [...]

When it comes to the crisis of Global Warming (what author and New York Times columnist Tom Friedman says should actually be called “Global Weirding”), things can get pretty overwhelming fast.
Animal extinction, water scarcity, rainforest destruction – these are all pretty heavy topics requiring big picture thinking and action.
And if world governments can’t even build [...]