ISD News

$75 through December 31st: Special Green Plus Offer for Sole Proprietors

The Institute for Sustainable Development is looking for 250 sole proprietors from five regions in the United States to participate in the  development of Green Plus Solo™. The Institute is developing Green Plus Solo™ specifically to help sole proprietors and  entrepreneurs in the pre-venture phase improve their triple bottom line sustainability.

The original Green Plus program is designed for businesses with five or more employees and scales up well for organizations with up to 500 employees. Recognizing that sole proprietors and entrepreneurs preparing to go to market face very different issues from larger organizations, the Institute began to design Green Plus Solo™ in 2008. Like the original Green Plus program, Green Plus Solo™ is designed to help small business owners become more sustainable through diagnostic tools, access to consultation from university experts and business peers, and online reference guides with links to specific national, regional and local assistance on different topics in People, Planet and Performance.

To become a Green Plus Solo partner register by clicking here.

Participants will have

• Full use of current Green Plus Sustainable Business Diagnostic Tools™
• Access to the proprietary Green Plus platform features through December 31, 2010, including the Green Plus Smaller Enterprise How To Guide™
• Opportunities to seek advice from the Institute’s university partners and from other businesses in the Green Plus network
• A designated National Green Plus Directory page (upon completion of the Green Plus Diagnostic Tool). On their Directory page, members can post their contact information, details about their products and services, video and links to news stories. Like Facebook, new entries appear on the Home Page of www.gogreenplus.org (for an example, please click here).

Process, Cost, and Special Credit for Participation

• For $75 (a $50 discount from the regular rate), sole proprietors will have immediate access to the Green Plus platform.
• Regardless of whether or not participants choose to pursue certification after January 1st, when the new Green Plus Solo™ is released, they will have access to Green Plus resources and use of a Directory page – as discussed above.
• Cost for the final Green Plus Solo™ program will be $125 beginning January, 2010.
• Participants are asked to go through the Green Plus diagnostic tool as it now stands, answer the questions, and indicate what is useful to them, what is not useful, and to suggest other topics that would be helpful via surveys, interviews or focus groups.

Eligibility & Requirements

Participants

• May have a business in any sector
• Should be sole proprietors of their business
• Are asked to complete the Green Plus Diagnostic Tool™ within 30 days of signing up (and no later than January 31, 2010)
• Agree to participate in a brief phone or in-person interview with a Fellow from the Institute

Further Background

The Institute for Sustainable Development is a public-private partnership of universities, chambers of commerce, businesses and philanthropic organizations created to provide small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) with affordable, practical triple bottom line sustainability expertise. Smaller enterprises comprise the vast majority of employers in the United States and are responsible for most new job creation – but have the least time and money to afford sustainability expertise. The Institute created the Green Plus program in recognition of this fact to help small businesses become more competitive while being better stewards of their communities and their environment.

In 2007, the business plan for the program was commissioned by Tony Waldrop, Vice Chancellor for Research and Economic Development at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, and the plan was developed by the Center for Sustainable Enterprise at UNC Chapel Hill’s Kenan-Flagler School of Business. Since then, the Institute has worked with centers at UNC and Duke University, chambers of commerce, businesses and philanthropic organizations to build the Green Plus program.

To find out more about becoming a Green Plus Solo partner, please contact Kirsten Hausman at khausman@gogreenplus.org or you can register by clicking here.