A popular location in Costa Rica to stay is La Cusinga. This hotel is a coastal rainforest eco lodge dedicated to marine and terrestrial conservation. It is important for La Cusinga to maintain these values as they are part of a private nature reserve where visitors can check out the rainforest and wildlife. This hotel is totally sustainable and provides a perfect location to take in the scenic views while continuing to live your sustainable lifestyle.

In the United States, Las Vegas see over 40,000,000 tourists every year. With summer approaching, businesses are preparing for wedding season. As a result, many women head to sin city for bachelorette parties. Las Vegas provides a number of sustainable buildings, none better however than the Palazzo Hotel & Resort. Recently, this hotel was named “The Most Eco-Friendly Hotel in America”. Because of its water recycling systems, solar panels for heating and the ability to reuse its own waste among others. The Palazzo exceeded every single one of the LEED standards set by the United States Green Building Council. Other Las Vegas hotels are jumping on board and also going green. Even “eco-friendly” clothing shops are popping up in the city!

With consumer wants and needs constantly changing it is important for organizations to adapt. With wedding season and Las Vegas preparing for another round of bachelorette parties, women have the ability to live their eco-friendly lifestyle away from home. They can also have a lot of fun doing it too.

About the Author: Sam Marquit, is an entrepreneurial independent contractor and home renovation/remodeling expert in New York who tracks interesting sustainable building sites. Forecasting the possible application and implementation of new green building materials and technologies is just one small part of his effort to reduce everyone’s carbon footprint.

Women didn’t get the vote by becoming lawmakers; they got it by launching a social movement to enfranchise women.  Allison Stevens

Citizen out cry works!

Remember Rush Limbaugh? He’s the guy who once owned the talking points for the Republican Party. Now he’s off the media buying menu when it comes to advertising dollars – no rational company with a solid brand can afford to be associated with someone so hateful and bent on destroying what’s left of civility.

 But more powerful was the boycott that ensued, with 98 advertisers pulling their support for the show.  The Daily Beast, 5.7.13

And the anti-buck didn’t stop at Rush: [thank you GoneRouge for the links]

Report: 48 Of 50 Top Advertisers ‘Exclude Rush And Hannity’ From Radio Commercial Buys

How an Advertiser Boycott Campaign Helped Push Glenn Beck Off the Air (2011)

Fox News admits Glenn Beck left because of advertiser boycott (4/2013)

Raising a stink about toxic personalities like Rush and others, or toxins in our food, or fracking chemicals in our water has advertising and big investment ramifications. When citizens stop giving personalties, products, articles  their time or money, business stops supporting them. When citizens go public and carve their opinions in the Internet cave wall, business changes even faster.

You can be a media activist by doing nothing. 

When you see pure sensation headlines, don’t click on them. Don’t reinforce that you’re interested in hearing what Past-Their-Prime-Personalities have to say. Don’t click on the stories about someone’s bikini perfect body. Don’t click on “stupid acts of (whomever).”  Everything you click on is fed back into the advertising numbers machine.

Most of us who wouldn’t buy a supermarket magazine  might click on the same articles when we’re home alone – except we’re not alone – the results are being tabulated. It’s the reason that Huffington Post is getting more and more supermarketey and less real news.  Ad dollars follow what the people follow – the more people clicking on the latest sensational headline, the more sensational junk is fed back to you — then the paid advertisers follow your lead.

Rush is going bye-bye because people are no longer buying the slop he’s selling and advertisers don’t want to risk being guilty by association. No media buys creates a big social change.

Try to recycle as much as you can!  If you need more inspiration check out this trailer — Midway — and see where your stuff is ending up. Less is more time to live.

Do I Need This from Kate Schermerhorn on Vimeo.

Today, (finally) the geek world is activity trying to do something about it — Social Media Week is setting a 50/50 ratio on their speaker roster. Kudos! When more women are on stage, the dialogue shifts. Sort of makes you wonder what you’ve been missing out on all of these years…

Below is their full invitation…

Dear SMW Community,Today is an important milestone in preparation for our next Social Media Week, which is scheduled for September 23-27. Today, we open event submission for the thousands of event partners around the world who help to shape the experience for SMW in 10 or more cities.

Learn more about our commitment here, and join us by submitting your event here or submitting or nominating a speaker here. Take it one step further and share our commitment with others using #Gender5050.For the 9th time, SMW opens up to our community, and as we look back on the growth of SMW overall, we reflect on the importance of diversity and balance. A recurring issue in the tech — and conference space — is gender balance.In the words of Lean In‘s Sheryl Sandberg: “Women are held back by many things: bias, lack of opportunity, lack of flexibility. We also hold ourselves back. We don’t sit at the table; we don’t raise our hands; we don’t raise our voice. i believe our world would be a better place if half our companies and half our countries were run by women.”When you have both men and women at the table together collaborating, we can celebrate differences and have a truly representative conversation. However, we have largely failed in our efforts in being balanced. We do not have fair representation, and we have not achieved a 50/50 balance in men and women participating in our events. The reason why is not important. The desire to address the issue is what matters, and my team and I are 100% committed towards making a fundamental change to how we approach diversity, starting with gender balance.Gender 50/50: It’s starts with all of us.

In addition to opening up event submission to you, our community, today we are making a commitment that by the end of 2014, we — together with you — commit to striving for a 50/50 balance in all our activities and in all cities. By including men and women like Andrew Rasiej and Deanna Zandt in all our activities from our Advisory Boards to event hosts to speakers, SMW can become truly balanced.

We invite you to join Gender 50/50 to help us move towards our goal of 50/50 representation this September. We challenge you to ensure your events have half or more female participation. We’ll work with our media partners to highlight the best & most balanced events. We will also document and share our experiences as we take on this challenge, including when we have been unsuccessful.

By increasing the diversity of the voices represented, we are building a more Open & Connected World, which is central to the mission of Social Media Week and our global theme for 2012.

Learn more about our commitment here, and join us by submitting your event here or submitting or nominating a speaker here. Take it one step further and share our commitment with others using #Gender5050.

Thank you,
Toby Daniels

ceo // crowdcentric
founder & executive director // social media week

Would you build your house by hand? How about an entire community center?

In honor of Earth Day, last Saturday I  attended the grand opening of Uncommon Good’s new community center made entirely out of bags of dirt. It’s an incredible structure built to last 500 years, but the opening ceremony impressed me even more in how it honored women in the most authentic way — starting with the women Gabrieleno-Tongva dancers circling back and forth because, “women weave the patterns of life,” according to Chief Anthony RedBlood Morales.

We often wonder what society would look like if more women were in leadership positions, the Whole Earth Building, UnCommon Good, and the supporting Methodist Church is an example of what would happen. Uncommon Good is directed by Nancy Mintie, Rev. Sharon Rhodes-Wickett, the lead pastor from the Claremont United Methodist Church helped to create a partnership between the church’s mission and the UnCommon Good eventually providing the land.

In conjunction with the mentoring work and education, the center also promotes urban farming. Because it serves the migrant and sometimes marginalized population, they invited Dolores Huerta, the co-founder of the United Farm Workers to speak. Dolores was arrested 22 times so far in her activism career to foster safer, chemical-free food and working conditions for migrant workers — she did it while raising 11 children.

Weaving Patterns into City Scapes

The Whole Earth Building is an example of what can be done by community hands, on the other end of the building scale, Marcela Oliva, a professor in architecture at LA Trade Tech College shows us what is possible with community workers when offered inspiring education – sustainable cities.

All these women and all the speakers here on In Women We Trust deserve high praise, not only for making things happen, but making them happen for the right reasons and weaving their influence into others. They are making the earth a more civil and sustainable place to live.

Happy Earth Day – this is what culture climate change looks like.

The Empowerment Project

Much of this site is about viewing the world as created through the female lens and showcasing the work.  This month a couple women and their friends are taking that literally and are out to make a film by women, about women, to inspire other women to take on the big dreams.

Sarah Moshman and Dana Michelle Cook are the creator, producer, and moxie behind the effort. They need your help.

“The Empowerment Project: Extraordinary Women Doing Extraordinary Things” is a docu-series that aims to create positive content for women by shining a light on inspirational, powerful, and strong women in many career fields across the US. Made for women by women!

We will be documenting our entire journey behind the scenes so people can see what it took to make this happen and what we learned along the way as women, as filmmakers, and as friends.

How about it, would you like to help? Check out the Empowerment Project kickstarter program and help get these gals on the road.

Typically, CEOs like to cover their green responsibility act by saying, “If the customer would ask for it, we’d sell it.” Well their wish has come true. Women are asking that stores get rid of products carrying these top 100 chemicals and they are posting the results of their conversations.

Mind the Store is a campaign sponsored by Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families. Participants talk to store managers and ask them get rid of the products that carry the 100 toxic chemicals. Here’s Harriet Shugarman’s report on her CVS visit followed by Katy Farber as she prepares to talk to Home Depot.

Walmart has their own sustainability index, but we don’t know what chemicals are covered. Does anyone know? Does the Index cover any of these top 100?  Please let me know the answer in the comment section.

Until we do know, we’ll keep asking…

Dear 3M (and Staples, too),

Who approved this at Scotch Brands? Normally, I like to champion the positive in the green movement and ignore the stupid, but when I saw this at Staples… it’s just so wrong on so many fronts.

1. I thought the Mad Men days were behind us. This doesn’t belong on a business desk and as an example of female power, it fails.

2. It doesn’t even function — the store sample was too light to stay anchored with used. It also takes up too much desk space for a product used so little and can’t it can’t easily fit into a drawer. It’s only purpose is to be an office party gag gift. It worked, it made me gag…

3. It’s completely the opposite of your environmental standards for innovation by producing junk that will end up in the trash at soon as the gifters aren’t looking.

Is this an example of how you meet your customer’s sustainability challenge, by selling them a plastic junk that won’t function and increases plastic waste that never EVER goes away?  On the 3M corporate website you champion your environmental footprint while contributing to your customers footprint. What’s up with that?

I don’t care if it’s selling. It should not have been put out on shelves as an option to begin with. You are suppose to be the good guys from Minnesota, home of the common sense people. Let’s start using it.

We need to work TOGETHER to resolve the pollution problem. Customers WANT to be good stewards, especially female customers. Please stop being a dope dealer and sell only smart products that are gifts worth giving and keeping for 50 years.  Make design decisions based on your own words below. 

We are guided by three strategic principles that make sustainability implicit in everything we do:

Economic Success: We build lasting customer relationships by developing differentiated, practical, and ingenious solutions to their sustainability challenges.

Environmental Stewardship: We provide practical solutions and products to address our environmental challenges for ourselves and our customers.

Social Responsibility: We engage key stakeholders in dialogue and take action to improve our sustainability performance.

With these strategic principles as a framework, we’re vigorously pursuing our key sustainability objectives. Among them:

• Managing our environmental footprint
• Developing solutions that address environmental and social challenges for our customers and society
• Assuring our products are safe for their intended use through their entire lifecycle
• Assuring the appropriate management of any 3M health and safety issues that may touch customers, neighbors, and the public
• Maintaining a safe and healthy workplace
• Satisfying our customers with superior quality and value
• Providing a supportive, flexible work environment
• Supporting local needs and education in communities where 3M employees live and work
• Conducting our business with uncompromising honesty and integrity
• Providing an attractive return for investors

Sustainability at 3M grew from a commitment to both innovation and ethical conduct. By continually increasing sustainability at the economic, social, and environmental levels, we believe we are building a strong, vital company today, and leaving a rich legacy on which future generations can build.  more…

And Staples, I’m not letting you off the hook, either. If 3M is working to produce smarter products, you need to help them by not buying the stupid ones until the smarter ones arrive. Quit perpetuating the problem. It’s not as if you have to work with an entire supply chain and slowly evolve, just don’t put it on the purchase order the next time around. It’s really easy to say just say no!

Over the course of 2010, we worked hard to develop and begin the implementation of a new overarching sustainability strategy, which we unveiled in 2011. This strategy focuses on the ways we can have the greatest beneficial impact on the environment while also meeting the needs of our customers and our business.

Five pillars constitute the foundation of Staples’ sustainability program:

• Selling more sustainable products and services
• Offering easy recycling solutions for our customers
• Eliminating operational waste
• Maximizing energy efficiency and the use of renewable energy
• Becoming a sustainability leader in the global community   more…

While corporations are taking one step forward to lower their carbon footprint, they can take two steps forward by not selling products that are one step away from being junk.

Women LOVE to champion smart, green, and socially responsible products. We’ve formed groups and sites around that effort. Don’t make me write another letter…