Location

The Kirtlandia Society hosts its monthly meeting featuring speaker Christopher Kuhar, Ph.D., Curator of Primates & Small Mammals, Cleveland Metroparks Zoo. The topic for the meeting is the "Role of Conservation Education in Africa."

Visit the Kirtlandia Society website for more information.

Location

AIGA Cleveland, in partnership with the Nance College of Business at Cleveland State University is hosting a viewing of Nathan Shedroff's session on Becoming a Sustainable Designer in 47 Easy Steps, from Compostmodern 09 Conference in San Francisco.

We will follow with a local panel discussion. Local Panelist will include:

• Pam Cerio, Pam Cerio Design
• Ann Csongei, Nance College of Business at CSU
• Mike Dungan, APISync
• Tracy Meredith, RIS The Paper House
• Doug Paige, Cleveland Institute of Art

Take It home! All attendees will receive a link to the entire webcast of the Compostmodern 09 Conference.

11:30 am - 12:00 pm - Registration and Check-In Lunch and refreshments will be provided. Parking is available in the 17th Street Garage ($6). February 27 Event Admission Prices AIGA Members - $10 Non-members - $20 Students - Free.

For more information.

Location

The World Peace Diet Lecture with Dr. Will Tuttle
Friday, September 5, 2008

Join Mercy For Animals for an informative lecture by Dr. Will Tuttle, who will present the main ideas in his groundbreaking and provocative book, The World Peace Diet. It is the first book to make explicit the invisible connections between our meals and our broad range of problems -- psychological, social, and spiritual, as well as health and environmental.

Dr. Tuttle offers powerful ways we can all experience healing and peace and contribute to a positive transformation of human consciousness.

Vegan snacks will be provided.

Where:     Cleveland Heights Library, 2345 Lee Rd. Cleveland Hts OH
When:       6:00 p.m. vegan snacks,  6:30 p.m. lecture begins

"Use The World Peace Diet as a guide to empower yourselves and others in making dietary choices that are powerful beyond what you can possibly imagine."  Julia Butterfly Hill, environmental activist and founder, Circle Of Life Foundation

"The World Peace Diet is one of the most provocative books I've ever read. This is a deep book, aglow with insights that penetrate and expose the complacency of a culture that has strayed painfully far from compassion."        John Robbins, noted author

"Will Tuttle brings a priceless perspective -- not only to the planetary crisis confronting us all, but also to powerful ways we each can affect it. This book is radiant with his learning and his compassion."      Dr. Joanna Macy, author, Coming Back To Life

"I am grateful for this powerful and cogent book. It has stretched my thinking (and heart) about animals, compassion, and our society."   John Mackey, founder, Whole Foods, Inc.

Visit www.worldpeacediet.org for more information.

Location

Discover the origins of some of the largest lakes in the world at this month's Kirtlandia Society lecture with Charles Herdendorf, CMNH Education Volunteer and Professor Emeritus, OSU School of Earth Science. 

Free. To find out more about the Kirtlandia Society, go here.  

Ideas that will transform a “pollution-based” to a sustainable economy are the providence of new leaders such as Sadhu Johnston, Van Jones and the sustainable entrepreneurs found in “Earth: The Sequel”, a New York Times Bestseller penned by Fred Krupp and Miriam Horn. They all shared a vision for the future at last Friday's climate change solutions symposium at Oberlin College.

The national dialogue is now balanced between urgency and excitement because "we're no longer debating climate change; we're talking about solutions,” Bruce Latimer, executive director, Cleveland Museum of Natural History noted in his welcoming remarks.

Indeed, some of the best and brightest solutions are on the rise in Chicago where Johnston, chief environmental officer and Mayor Daley’s deputy chief of staff, is impressively reshaping a 20th century industrial city into “one where you don’t have to leave to find nature.” It’s a bold vision backed by a long list of sustainability programs: At least a dozen LEED-certified green buildings including high-rises and public housing, alleys replaced with permeable pavers, a green roofs grant program, green retrofits for its historic bungalows, a local wind turbine project, a green jobs training center and on.

Unlike some cities that signed the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement and then stalled, Chicago released a plan based on calculating its carbon footprint and establishing transition scenarios. Chicago’s plan is a roadmap for government operations and investments with goals such as a more livable city and targets to reduce their carbon footprint to 12 metric tonnes per capita annually.

Location

A two-day I-Open workshop

Welcome to the new world of economic development based on networks. Learn the leadership skills you need to strengthen collaboration in your community and region. Here is an innovative, tested approach to building collaboration for economic and workforce development. Gain the insights, roadmaps and tools you need to develop new ideas and translate them into action. Strategic doing is a new approach to building the civic networks that your community and region need to prosper in the future.

This workshop is ideal for innovative civic leaders who want to expand their perspectives on economic and workforce development. Anyone who must lead a community or region in developing strategies for economic development and workforce development needs new analytic tools to understand how they can have the most impact.

Workshop Details:

When: April 23 - 25, 2008

April 23: Arrive at 6:00 pm on for a kickoff dinner and networking

April 24: All day workshop and dinner

April 25: One-half day workshop and lunch. Adjourn at 2:00 pm

Register online at 123 Signup

Send your check to: The Institute for Open Economic Networks (I-Open), Cleveland Midtown Innovation Center, 4415 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio 44115.

Location

Meeting to continue the dialogue concerning how to become the first region nationally to embrace the application of biomimicry in the design of our products, buildings, organizations and communities.

More information about biomimicry and the collaborative.

If preserving historically significant architecture is the very definition of sustainability, it can also be a long and winding road. Such is the case for adaptively reusing the Marcel Breuer-designed Ameritrust Tower.

A small group of thoughtful people continue to make the case that the county will save millions of dollars while reducing its budget deficit, diverting tons of materials from the landfill and preserving an important piece of our national building heritage.

They may have turned the tide as recent reports indicate the county is in conversation with two developers interested in taking the tower and making something of it.

Read a brief history of this preservation effort, including letters from influential art and architecture professionals, and GreenCityBlueLake’s appeal to the National Trust for Historic Preservation which lead to the Trust sending a letter this week calling for the county to “investigate this possibility to save the building from the landfill through sale to a preservation-sensitive developer committed to saving both the Rotunda and the Ameritrust Tower.”

For advocates of preserving modern architecture, the fate of the Ameritrust Tower, designed by Bauhaus-trained Marcel Breuer in 1971, embodies their frustration with the general malaise toward a style that promised architecture for the masses. But, it also holds a glimmer of hope for an ad hoc coalition of government waste foes, architects, environmentalists, and fans of Design Within Reach and Dwell magazine's mid-century design, who are working tirelessly to change the minds of two of the three Cuyahoga County Commissioners who want it razed.

Churches and neoclassical halls have been the low hanging fruit for preservation organizations for years while visionary glass-and-steel and pre-cast concrete structures of the modernists have been mostly shunned. (Update: the county commissioners have sold the Ameritrust Complex to The K&D Group of Willoughby who intend to preserve the Breuer Tower and to transform the complex into a complete, mixed-use lifestyle center encompassing almost 10 square city blocks)

What if your organization could make better decisions, faster, without getting bogged down by endless debates or office politics -- AND give everyone a voice in the process?

That’s the promise of Holacracy™, a new idea for delivering organizational agility in today’s fast-paced world of constant change.

On Tuesday, Oct. 30, business, nonprofit and academic leaders will gather to explore and experiment with Holacracy™, a cutting-edge system designed to help organizations successfully navigate complexity and uncertainty.  The event is sponsored by Case Western Reserve University’s Weatherhead School of Management and the Cleveland-based consulting firm Conte & Company.

Conte & Company is a Cleveland-based consulting firm that supports leaders, teams and organizations to solve complex problems, reach their full potential and realize their goals. The firm offers leadership development, executive coaching, team development, meeting facilitation and organizational change consulting.

Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University, is internationally acclaimed for redefining management education and is known as one of the most innovative business schools in the world. Its Organizational Behavior Department has been ranked best overall in the world by the Financial Times for the five year period (2003-2007). http://weatherhead.case.edu/