Oregon’s Green Expert On Sustainable Biz

How valuable would you say an education in sustainability is to recruiters?  

Usually employers value the classic hardcore business skills and understanding sustainability is a bonus, kind of like a cherry on top. But sometimes, employers are specifically seeking experience with sustainability analysis and reporting, so it’s a good combination to understand both the hardcore business skills and sustainable business practices. I’ve certainly seen exponential growth in interest in sustainability during my professional life over the past 25 years.

From your experience, what types of students are attracted to studying sustainability?

Well, I’d say I’ve seen three different kinds of people: I see people who have been working in business for a few years who want to add a little bit more meaning to their business work life and also want to add the MBA. So they come back to school to increase their income and to get into some aspect of business that makes more sense to them.

And then I see people from environmental sciences and environmental studies backgrounds. They’ve also worked two or three years and want to come back to school and pick up the business side, usually because they’ve seen that business is a powerful tool to harness for environmental and social purposes.

The third kind of person that I see comes from an apparently irrelevant background – like journalism, or public policy, or chemistry – but they have decided that they want to focus on sustainable business with a journalism sort of background, if you will. So they might get into the communications part of sustainability, or someone with a chemistry background might get into new product development, or somebody with a public policy background might get into working on government incentives for businesses.

What are some key trends in sustainability that you’re introducing into the coursework?

We are developing courses right now in sustainable food entrepreneurship and in the greening of sports. So sustainable food entrepreneurship – there’s a tremendous trend (especially in the Pacific Northwest here) toward starting different kinds of sustainable food businesses. We had some students last year start a company that they called Red Duck Ketchup. It’s basically a ketchup company but organic, local, and with curry and spicy flavors – and they’re doing very well. And there are so many larger sustainable food businesses here locally – big warehouses, big distributors, big producers; there are a lot of opportunities to work for these companies.

With sports – all teams of all sports seem to be interested in greening their operations. They’re interested in saving money by saving electricity, saving water, managing their waste; all of this makes financial sense as well as environmental sense. They’re also starting to look at their supply chains: looking at the equipment and uniforms that they buy, making sure they’re not made in sweatshops, all those kinds of things. They’re also trying to figure out how to offset fan travel to games and team travel to other venues.

It’s just a really growing trend. The trailblazers were really here in Portland, but most teams are starting to think about these things. There’s even a little non-profit called the Green Sports Alliance that has been helping sports companies figure out how to be green.

Have your students proposed studying any other trends?

A third trend really came from our students here, and that is impact investing. We have a lot of students studying finance, and they wanted to be financiers, but they really wanted to figure out how to invest their money to do good as well as to do well. So they requested an impact investing class, and we have that in place now. We’re starting to talk about developing an impact investing fund that they’ll actually manage to practice investing in this way.

Where are your plans for the near future?

We are really working on developing an undergraduate concentration in sustainable business, and we are working to develop a sustainable business toolkit that all of our students can be equipped with when they graduate. So we’re interviewing employers and figuring out what tools employers in different industries would be interested in – we’re talking to the renewable energy industry, to the food and beverage industry, to the outdoor apparel industry in order to develop a relevant toolbox for students to use with their future employers.

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