Guest post by Audrey Boguchwal, Christine Primmer and Jennifer Williams, MBA ‘14 What do a waste-water treatment plant, a high-performance vehicle with a stark resemblance to a Lotus roadster, a solar panel financier, a Sonoma county vineyard and a group of 8 UNC Kenan-Flagler students have in common? A passion for finding new and innovative solutions to energy challenges, and a sense of adventure. Now that our first year is almost over, it’s time to reflect on some of the experiences that stand out. One of these experiences was the UNC Energy Club’s San Francisco Bay Area Career Trek. As many Kenan-Flagler students wrapped up holiday travel in early January, the UNC Energy Club embarked on our first West Read More
Author Archives: Tracy Triggs-Matthews
The Redwoods Group: Not Your Typical Insurance Company
04/23/2013 – 1:44 pm
By Jessie Robinson, BS Environmental Science ’16 Who knew that an insurance company could be financially sustainable and effect positive social change? Well that is what the Undergraduate Net Impact Career Fellows, a group of select UNC students, discovered when Kevin Trapani, CEO of The Redwoods Group, and Dan Baum, the Executive Director of The Redwoods Group Foundation, spoke on March 26 as part of the Net Impact Career Series. The Redwoods Group is a social enterprise whose mission is to love, serve, and transform, in that order. A certified B corporation that aims to satisfy stakeholders, not just shareholders, the company mainly insures YMCAs across the country as well as other nonprofit and for-benefit camps. Trapani and Baum stressed Read More
Counter Culture Coffee Shares the Business of Being Sustainable
04/10/2013 – 11:33 am
By Doug Stiegler (Undergraduate Business ’15) On Tuesday, February 26th, Brett Smith (MBA ’94), Founder and President of Counter Culture Coffee, spoke to a group of Undergraduate Net Impact Career Fellows. He discussed his philosophy on sustainability and introduced Counter Culture Coffee’s triple bottom line business model. Not only was I excited for this installment of the Net Impact Career Fellows speaker series, but I was pumped that it was going to meet the President of my favorite coffee roaster. Counter Culture Coffee is a wholesale coffee vendor whose vision is to pursue coffee perfection by creating partnerships that ensure prosperity for all people, improving the natural environment and operating efficiently to minimize our environmental impact. Launched in 1995, Counter Read More
Brandon Tidwell (EMBA ’14) Moving the Needle on CSR at Darden Restaurants
03/06/2013 – 1:22 pm
By Brandon Tidwell (EMBA ’13) The following is an excerpt from a blog post by current weekend MBA student, Brandon Tidwell. To read the full post, please go to Sustainability at Darden. “When I first began my career in corporate social responsibility (CSR) in 2007, our team at FedEx continually struggled to get our citizenship message out to various stakeholders. In the years to come, FedEx introduced its first Global Citizenship Report, launched a blog for ongoing storytelling and leveraged key social media channels to connect with numerous audiences. The team began to see the citizenship story take shape and become visible, and readily available, to the public sphere. Today, most Fortune 500 companies have issued their first CSR/sustainability report, Read More
Taking the Long View – Lessons from Procter and Gamble
02/18/2013 – 10:39 am
By Matt Crook, CSE Leadership Fellow (MBA ’14) View the video of P&G CEO Bob McDonald’s talk. As business leaders, we must consider the long-term strategy of our organizations and the impact our decisions have on other people. Having a deep knowledge of and empathy for other cultures will be critical in doing business in the future, and Procter and Gamble can serve as an example to other businesses, regardless of size or mission. On January 14, Bob McDonald, the CEO of P&G (number 26 on the Fortune 500 list) came to UNC Kenan-Flagler as a part of the Dean’s Speaker Series. His talk focused on the growth prospects of P&G and their Global Water Project in Africa and UNC’s Read More
MTM Careers Partnership Connects UNC Kenan-Flagler Students to Impact Careers
01/11/2013 – 12:04 pm
The first in a series of posts about careers in sustainability by Dr. Boutla, co-founder of More Than Money Careers (MTM Careers). UNC Kenan-Flagler has established a strong partnership with MTM Careers to help students get clear, get connected and get hired in sustainability careers. The following is an excerpt from the MTM Careers blog. Read the full post. By Dr. Mrim Boutla, co-founder, More Than Money Careers Our collaboration with UNC Kenan-Flagler started over a year ago, with Katrin Baker from their Career Management Center (CMC) and Tracy Triggs-Matthews participating in our online staff training. This guaranteed that students would receive consistent strategic advice and resources whether they asked their career questions to CMC or CSE staff. Seeing the value Read More
Alumni Report From the Field: Annie Evans Restoring Atlanta
01/04/2013 – 8:53 pm
The first in a series of reports from UNC Kenan-Flagler alumni incorporating sustainability into their work. This Alumni Report from the Field comes from Annie Evans (MBA ’11), Vice President of Development for Green Street Properties. By Annie Evans (MBA ’11) Green Street Properties is restoring a 2 million SF building built by Sears in 1926 as a distribution center and retail store, and creating a mixed-use project that will have 450 SF of office, 330 SF of retail and 260 residential units. I’m overseeing the residential portion of the project as a component developer assisting Jim Irwin (MBA from Emory), who is the lead overseeing the entire development. After Sears discontinued operations the building was owned by the City of Read More
UNC Undergraduates Accepting the Challenge to Create Positive Change in the World
12/18/2012 – 8:38 am
By Tyler Bench (BSBA ’13), Undergraduate Net Impact co-President and CSE Leadership Fellow People who create positive change have one thing in common: the ability to recognize flaws in a system without dismissing its value. The students, academics, and professionals I met at William and Mary’s 2012 Corporate Collaborative for Sustainability recognize the limitations of business, but also understand its power to create value in society. They are capable of conceptualizing a sustainable balance between societal progress and the conservation of natural resources that make civilization possible. They believe that a market system, driven by competition, can still respect the rights of all earth’s people. This year’s 3CS conference featured design thinking as a means of innovation in sustainability. Read More
Passion At Work
09/18/2012 – 1:11 pm
By Whitney Robinson, MBA 2013 Like most first-year MBA students, I had more than one passion I wanted to follow in business school; marketing strategy and sustainability. This can make choosing an internship even more difficult, but occasionally, the stars align and your passions come together in the perfect summer internship. My interests intersect to create sustainable beauty: efficacious products that provide an added benefit for the planet and profit for a company. I spent my summer internship at L’Oreal working with the Pureology DMI team (DMI is the French abbreviation for International Marketing Strategy). Pureology is a professional hair care brand, sold exclusively through approved salons and recommended for women with colour-treated hair. On my first day, my supervisor Read More
Ethiopian Growth Rates Experienced Upfront
09/06/2012 – 9:51 am
Kevin Seals, MBA 2012 The seventh in a series of reflections on UNC Kenan-Flagler’s Sustainability Immersion, our capstone experiential learning course where graduating MBAs work to solve real-world business challenges in Eastern North Carolina and East Africa. I was drawn to UNC Kenan-Flagler because I was captivated by two notions: (1) that an MBA skill set could be applied to address some of the most pressing environmental and social problems of our time, and (2) that emerging markets represented not only a “fortune at the bottom of the pyramid,” but also a laboratory for experimentation with innovative forms of economic development. I feel so fortunate to have had the opportunity to explore these ideas in depth through Kenan-Flagler’s unique Sustainability Read More