Excited for the January 2025 Sustinability & Innovation Coffee Meetup.
Ann Arbor SEU
In November, Ann Arbor voters authorized the creation of a Sustainable Energy Utility (SEU). The SEU will be an
opt-in, supplemental, community-owned energy utility that provides 100% renewable energy from local solar and battery storage systems installed at participating homes and businesses in the city
We will hear from Missy and have a chance to discuss and network with the sustainability community in Ann Arbor.
Come for the coffee, pastries, and inspiration, stay for the networking.
Details
Ann Arbor Sustainable Energy Utility Update
Missy Stults, Ph.D., Sustainability and Innovations Director at the City of Ann Arbor
Wednesday January 29, 8 – 9:30 AM
BrightWorks Coworking, 3027 Miller Road, Ann Arbor
Join us to learn about this groundbreaking initiative!
Gratitude
Thanks to William Crane for cohosting this series with me. Thanks to Cathy Colson for the graphic design.
Thank you to BrightWorks for providing the space. Thank you to our sponsors, the Green Business Challenge and Ann Arbor SPARK for the inspiration and support.
Ilyse Kaplan will present on Financing our Sustainable Future.
You can find us in the Cahoots Event space. Come in through the Cahoots Cafe: 206 East Huron Street #Suite 2 Ann Arbor, MI 48104.
Come to learn, to connect with others in the field, and have coffee and pastries. Thanks to the sponsorship of Ann Arbor SPARK and the Green Business Challenge, the event is free of charge including coffee and pastries.
Update – we had a lovely turnout and Ilyse gave a great talk!
William Crane will present on U.S. Policy Shifts and Global Trends for sustainability strategy, innovation, and investment. We’ll also have plenty of time for networking.
Thanks to the sponsorship of Ann Arbor SPARK and the Green Business Challenge, the event is free of charge and we’ll provide coffee, tea, and breakfast pastries.
Can’t make it this time? No worries! This is the first in a monthly series focused on sustainability, innovation, and connections.
Update – we had a wonderful turnout. Thanks William for kicking us off!
Today I had the pleasure of being the emcee for the first ever a2tech360 Sustainable Future Forum. Laura Berarducci and the team at Ann Arbor SPARK put together a great program of talks from sustainability leaders and innovators.
We learned from Sartorius, Toyota North America, Wacker Chemical, and the University of Michigan. We cheered on four innovation highlights: ThermoVerse, Fourth State, 4M Consolidated Brands, and Next Cycle. We celebrated the Ann Arbor Green Business awardees.
My favorite part was meeting other folks committed to sustainability including students, community members, consultants, and entrepreneurs.
Why Sustainability Matters to Me
Here are my Sustainable Future Forum opening remarks interspersed with images from my slides.
First, let me tell you a little of my story. I’m Dunrie Greiling.
I am a lifelong Michigander and I’ve lived in Ann Arbor for thirty years.
I love living here – I love the proximity to farmland, both for the open landscape and the fresh high quality food from our local farms. Did you know that Michigan has over 300 agricultural products which puts us with the second most agricultural diversity in the nation, second only to California?
Farmers market vegetables – stock photo
I love our open spaces, the eskers, the dunes, the forests, the lakes and rivers.
Kirtland’s warbler – stock photo
I love the birds and their worms, the insects that sing in the trees, and the frogs that gobble them up.
Michigan lake – stock photo
I love escaping up north, jumping into cold lake water (makes me feel alive in the best way), I love spending time with friends and family next to a beach bonfire or a fireplace.
I love the four seasons: the spring flowers: trillium, liverwort, trout lily,
Trillium, liverwort, and trout lily – personal photos
the long summer days,
A moth in my backyard in Ann Arbor – personal photo
Protecting access to all of that requires healthy farms, healthy forests, clean and safe air, water, and soil, biodiversity, and reducing or reversing our contributions to climate change.
At the same time, I love the dynamism of our college town. I appreciate the growth in town–even though sometimes simply getting across town has been difficult because of all of the construction. We need to build to accommodate our community, we need to build to keep people employed, we need to keep the great ideas that originate in this smart, problem solving community here in our region.
These are the ingredients of what makes Ann Arbor and this part of Michigan so great: nature, growth, and innovation. And these things need to be balanced. How to do it is not always obvious.
I have a Ph.D. in plant ecology from the University of Michigan, and I have worked in software startups for the last few decades. The common thread for me has been mission-driven: my latest startup experiences have been focused on access to justice, then access to safe drinking water. Now I’m working on the organizational sustainability of a biodiversity scientific organization, iDigBio.
My niece has just started at the University of Michigan and I’m spending more time with her, and I’m thrilled one of her interests is environment. I’m inspired by her environmentalism. The world is in front of her and she’s so talented and she is part of a generation who is idealistic and motivated. They make me want to be a better person, set a better example. They make me want to have, to make, a better world for them to inherit.
I heard on the radio recently that Earth Overshoot Day – the day of the year when we’ve consumed more than the earth can generate in a year – already happened this year. It was August 1. That means that every day since the beginning of August humanity has overdrawn our account with the sun, the water, and the organisms on our planet.
The triple planetary crisis refers to the three main interlinked issues that humanity currently faces: climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss. Each of these issues has its own causes and effects and each issue needs to be resolved if we are to have a viable future on this planet.
This is a lot, right? We are up against some real challenges.
We have some choices ahead. Yet not quite the way we might think. We sometimes feel like we have to choose – nature or economy. Housing for people or habitat for plants and animals. This dualistic oppositional thinking is not going to get us where we need to be. It’s not one or the other. We aren’t separate from the world around us. We have to find a way to balance nature and economy, habitat for people, plants and animals, production and protection and preservation, for our shared future.
Beach grass – stock photo
We need entrepreneurship and innovation to solve complex problems so we as a society can learn to grow with balance. We need each other – both to support each other and hold each other accountable. Maybe most importantly, to do all this we need stories. Stories of success, examples of leadership and creativity to light the way to inspire us to recognize solutions and bring them to life.
That’s why I’m here today – to hear stories from innovators, leaders, and the community about our shared sustainable future. I trust that is also why you’re here. Thank you for coming and we’re going to have a great day.
My Closing Remarks
So on behalf of everyone here, I’d like to thank you again.
Given the complexity of the challenge we are up against we will need more than just the innovations we heard about today. We will also need the innovations that each of you is dreaming about, and to make that happen, we need to come together, like this today, to hear and celebrate progress, to hold ourselves, our community, and our leadership accountable to our commitments, and we need to do the work of socializing and fundraising to implement these changes.
What’s our call to action? Make sure to connect with people you met today on LinkedIn, over tea, via text. Let’s keep the stories going, keep them alive. Together we can bring about a Sustainable Future.
We will hear about successful sustainability initiatives at international companies (Sartorius and Wacker Chemical), green tech entrepreneurs including Shantonio Burch from ThermoVerse, and cheer the City of Ann Arbor’s green business challenge award winners. I will emcee.
See you there!
Update – we had a fabulous time. Hope to see you at the next one.
Lisa Wozniak, the Executive Director of the Michigan League of Conservation Voters
Each of the speakers shared about their journey to their current leadership positions, their philosophy of leadership, and advice for aspiring leaders. The audience also asked good questions about community involvement and the future and current impact of AI/ML on environmental solutions.
Lean into what you’re good at and don’t pretend you’re going to be good at everything. Be humble in recognizing where you need to bring in smart people to be part of your team and trust them, give them responsibility that they can own and run with.
If you’re a young leader, really spend some time learning how to write. If you can pair your scientific expertise, or your very technical expertise, or your legal or policy expertise with that abiliy to write you really can change the world.
We’re all on a lifelong journey of figuring out why we’re on the planet, what we’re supposed to do, what we’re passionate about, [and] how does that fit with what needs are in the world. And I think it is about constructing for yourself a lot of experiments: ways of trying different things that gradually lead you to that union between who you are and what you’re about, why you’re here, and some pressing issue in the world that needs to be solved.
