Most MBA students are excited just to be able to work on a fun project for their summer internship, and maybe get a full time offer with their employer. Meanwhile, Mike Chasnow, a student at UNC Kenan-Flagler and Center for Sustainable Enterprise (CSE) Consultant for the summer, is working with Jeff Hughes, the director of the Environmental Finance Center (EFC) at the UNC School of Government. Mike and the rest of the CSE team are helping EFC in their work supporting state and local governments to create financing mechanisms for energy efficiency and renewable projects, and now the EFC/CSE team is helping the NC State Energy Office to draft an RFP for disbursing about $5 million USD to help finance Read More
Monthly Archives: July 2010
Sustainability Summit to be held in Durham, NC
07/13/2010 – 7:19 pm
One of the great blessings of UNC Kenan-Flagler is our surrounding community. This fall, a local organization, SJF Advisory Services, is hosting the SJF Summit on the New Green Economy right in our backyard in Durham, NC. SJF Advisory Services connects, inspires and accelerates sustainable entrepreneurs and the fields that support them. Kenan-Flagler has two MBA interns at SJF this summer. Joel Thomas is working for SJF Advisory Services and AJ Dye is working for its affiliate impact investor, SJF Ventures. A video previewing the summit is below.
Whole-system sustainability thinking in Germany
07/12/2010 – 6:59 am
Greetings once again from Berlin. The seminar I was attending about Germany’s approach to sustainability has ended. Rounding out the schedule was a trip to the German equivalent of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The German Environmental Protection Agency is housed in a state-of-the-art building that, in addition to being a model green building, contains features to aid the sighted and hearing impaired and is used as a community center where concerts and art events are hosted. We were also fortunate to meet with the Chancellor of the Frei (Free) University of Berlin who described their incentive system for inducing professors to conserve energy — researcher’s departments would be directly credited the amount of money equivalent to that which they Read More
Green features of Reichstag
07/08/2010 – 2:33 pm
The pace of this seminar has been astounding. Sunday we visited the Reichstag, home of the German Legislature, to meet with a representative of the Green party and to tour the building’s green features, of which the most physically striking was the heating, natural light, and ventilation system incorporated into the building’s glass dome. The glass dome, added to the building after re-unification in preparation for the relocation of the federal government from Berlin, also symbolizes transparency and accountability. The glass dome physically manifests these ideals through its spiraling walkways…with people walking up and around the dome, the legislature which meets in the chamber directly below it is constantly reminded that they serve the people. In the mid-1990s, the German Read More