S&S is honored to announce that we are one of the recipients of Harvard’s 2014 Green Carpet awards for sustainability. We’re thrilled to be joining past winners Lester Brown, Bill Clark and the Harvard Business School Executive Education program and hope the award will aid us in continuing the type of coverage that S&S brings to issues in sustainability. The goal of the Green Carpet award is to recognize “the outstanding efforts of teams and individuals across Harvard to create a healthy, more sustainable campus.” While our work has a broader scope than that – we aim to reach an audience far beyond any one campus – it is a good reminder that real change and progress on sustainability starts with small steps . Even large-scale projects are the result of hundreds or thousands of small actions. Programs like the Green Carpet award call attention to those who have been successful in taking these small steps and hopefully encourage others to follow in their footsteps. Our award was given in the category of Innovation/Creativity due to our use of new technology to develop and advance “better processes to produce impactful change.” Sustainability is not a new challenge but it has been given new prominence, and some might say a new urgency, so solutions must be innovative if they are to work. Traditional approaches have not had success on the scale that many believe is necessary if we are to solve all of the wicked problems we face. While our approach is certainly not the only one, hopefully by bringing together the input of experts across the multiple facets of sustainability we can provide the information that leads to additional innovation and, ultimately, solutions to the challenges we face. We are proud to have been recognized for the work that we’ve done thus far, and to be included in the company of past winners. This will serve as a reminder of the importance of new methods that can drive real change on the ground for us and for others who would like to follow our lead. But it is certainly not an end point and S&S will continue to push the debate and discussion around sustainability forward. Image Credit: Harvard Office of Sustainability
