Out in San Francisco, the Mecca of sustainable business and progressive thinking, I just finished up with Green America’s (Co-Op America’s new name) Green Business Conference. It was an opportunity to strengthen connections with folks we know and develop new relationships with many new wonderful companies and organizations.

Amidst the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, the Green community remains optimistic about the exponential growth of responsible business and public awareness. There’s a lot of excitement about our new national leadership to help support great change for our country, and the prevailing sentiment is not fearful, but that, “It’d be a shame to waste a good crisis.”

BetterWorld Telecom remains poised to powerfully serve perhaps the only rapidly growing sector of our new economy. What a pleasure!

Sustainably,

Jacob

On Tuesday November 11th members of the Betterworld team joined with 1Sky to help prepare for the November 18th Climate Leadership NOW rally that will take place in Washington DC. Volunteers, members and socially minded people from across the 50 states will gather on November 18th to welcome the president elect and the new congress by calling on them to make climate an immediate priority in 2009.

Work needed to be done leading up to this event with over 3,000 registered folks expected to be in attendance. Volunteers and workers spent the afternoon at 1Sky headquarters in Takoma Park Maryland preparing welcome packets to those that signed up for the event. We will also be joining the 1Sky team on Tuesday the 18th for rally – for more information about 1Sky or the event on November 18th, please visit: http://www.1sky.org/

Rallying for 1Sky,

Erin

The Christmas season is almost upon us, but for one family in Manning, SC, their holiday gift should be delivered a week early. Drenita and her 4 year old daughter Aniya are anxiously awaiting moving day in December when they finally get to move into their brand new home. For months, Drenita has been working right along side area volunteers, friends and family to achieve her dream.

BetterWorld Telecom employees Gloria Costa and Joe Londeree, from our Manning, SC office,  lent a helping hand last week. Most of the work was priming and painting walls and trim, and the team wonders how more of the paint ended up on Joe than on the walls.

This home is the first of five Habitat for Humanity homes planned in the area over the next year. It takes approximately three months to complete each home and BetterWorld Telecom employees will be on each job site to help the community.

Gloria and Joe

We were fortunate this week to be able to present at the first Green Telecom Summit, held in Berlin. Along with Verizon, BetterWorld Telecom was the only other U.S. telecom carrier presenting at the conference. The focus of the conference was the overall impact of climate change - what are the challenges we are facing in society as a whole and how can the telecoms industry work to reduce the impact?

To maximize our green mantra, we presented via BetterWorld’s LiveMeeting video/audio/web conferencing suite, which, minus a few human errors on my part, worked flawlessly and showed how we can can truly use telecom as a carbon mitgation strategy for all business.  The BetterWorld presentation focused on how we have been able to navigate the highly competitive telecoms marketplace by demonstrating sustainable strategies and focusing on customers who share our mission, in addition to the emerging trends of telecom being touted as one of the major carbon abatement strategies available to business and consumers in the next 3 to 5 years.

Other topics of the Summit included: Cost-efficiencies as a key driver for going green, exploiting new market opportunities with lower carbon-intensity products, making the most of renewable energy - exploring the alternatives, the business case for going green and determining commercial viability for green communications in the telecom sector.

The global telecom market was truly represented in both presenters and attendees, including representatives from  all over Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Far East and South America. While the telecom sector has been slow to catch on to sustainability as an industry, there sure seems to be growing momentum and the Green Telecom Summit was proof of that fact. Congratulations to the UK-based team at Informa Telecoms and Media for putting on an imporant and successful show. For more information: www.greentelecomsummit.com

 Matt

The BetterWorld team was out in force again at this year’s DC GreenFest - - we don’t have the final numbers but it seemed the largest for sure to date and the crowds were very active. As always the case, our friends from Seven Star, Coop America, and Global Exchange put on a great show and deserve the highest congratulations. We made many new friends and were able to spend quality time with many old friends as well. Not much rest for the weary as our west coast team is suiting up now for the San Francisco Green Business Conference and Green Festival which start in just days. Looking forward to seeing our west coast customers and partners there this weekend.  For more information: www.greenfestivals.com

The BetterWorld Team

While it is our policy as a company not to endorse political positions or candidates, we are excited to find a new application for our virutal PBX and unified communications technologies in political campaigns.  As we have been touting these technologies as enabling greener solutions and more democratic solutions for the workplace (see previous blogs on our project with BGI, and partnership with WorldBlu), we are feverishly trying to keep up with deploying our virtual calling platform for a number of state headquarters in the Obama-Biden Campaign for Change including campaign offices in Nevada, Colorado, New Hampshire, Montana, Wisconsin, Virginia and Pennsylvania.

Specifically, the Obama campaign requirements as they hit the homestretch of the campaign are quick deployment, a flexible platform that can virtually handle hundreds or thousands of calls at once & configurable to specific call trees and local requirements. Working closely with one of our technology and network partners, Aptela, we have been able to ramp up a number of locations connected to different phone banks to help ease the rush of calls that will be escalating as we approach election day.

This is an exciting time for America, regardless of which side of the fence you find yourself - we are excited to be playing a part in this amazing and historic election season! Above all, don’t forget to vote!

In democracy,

Matt 

The 2008 SVN fall conference is off and running and the energy level is higher than ever - - just saw a great presentation from Phil Angelides and Jerome Ringo, leaders of the Apollo Alliance. What an amazing organization with a great vision! 

The Apollo Alliance is a coalition of business, labor, environmental, and community leaders working to catalyze a clean energy revolution in America to reduce our nation’s dependence on foreign oil, cut the carbon emissions that are destabilizing our climate, and expand opportunities for American businesses and workers.

Inspired by the vision and technological achievements of the Apollo space program, the Apollo Alliance promotes policies and initiatives to speed investment in clean energy technology and energy efficiency, put millions of Americans to work in a new generation of well-paid, green collar jobs, and make America a global leader in clean energy products and services.

For more information: www.apolloalliance.org

More soon as the conference unfolds,

Matt & Jim

Over the past few months, BetterWorld’s carbon footprint has been audited by BeGreen (www.begreennow.com), and we are pleased to report that we have moved our carbon footprint certification to BeGreen.  

BeGreen Carbon Offsets are the latest sustainable product offered by BetterWorld Telecom customer and partner, Green Mountain Energy — BeGreen’s parent company.  BeGreen’s identity as a carbon offset provider is linked with Green Mountain’s decade of experience supplying cleaner energy.  Green Mountain Energy began in 1997 with a simple idea: “to change the way power is made”. Since then, Green Mountain has become the nation’s leading cleaner energy provider.

As the first renewable energy marketer to offer a carbon solutions product line, Green Mountain emphasizes that their vision reaches far beyond that of an electricity supplier. In 2006 they blazed a new trail, with the launch of their carbon offsetting division BeGreenNow. Since then, BeGreenNow has expanded to serve the carbon offsetting needs of both their individual and business customers. 

Environmental integrity is the foundation of a trustworthy carbon offset provider.  BeGreen carbon offsets, backed by the progressive mindset of Green Mountain Energy, provide reliable, transparent opportunities to invest in lower emitting technologies like renewable energy, forest restoration, and energy efficiency projects. They work with well known non-profit organizations like American Forests, The Pacific Forest Trust, The Voluntary Carbon Standard, and The Climate Trust to provide high quality carbon offsets. They also source high quality renewable energy credits from wind, solar, hydro, and biomass facilities nationally and have helped build over 35 Green Mountain Energy wind and solar installations to date.

We will be publishing BetterWorld’s detailed carbon footprint efforts in the 2008 BetterWorld Corporate Citizenship report, due out in the Spring  of ‘09 - in addition to offsetting our own corporate footprint, we are in the process of creating the world’s first voice and data telecom usage offset, where we will be offsetting all of our customer network usage, helping to enhance our position as the leading environmental telecom carrier in North America.

Green Now,

Matt

Many companies and industries have taken up the cause of sustainability and are helping to lead us into our next phase of evolution. Out front is the building/construction/design industry, behind the work of the UG Green Building Council and the LEED standard, successful, pioneering companies such as Patagonia and REI, as well as Clean Tech, alternative power and alternative fuels.

Far behind in the debate is the telecommunications industry, at least in the U.S. – its leaders barely showing up on the radar if at all. While the EPA’s recent report indicting data centers as one of the most concentrated hogs of energy, this only begins to scratch the surface of devices, wires, and switching centers that all add up to a much higher and more concentrated figure than the EPA estimate for just co location /data center facilities.

At the intersection of new technologies and our desire to codify methods, techniques and corporate practices that can start to make a dent in this huge footprint is where BetterWorld Telecom has partnered with the Bainbridge Graduate Institute to focus our efforts. We will be devoting many of our donation dollars, time and energy in the coming months and years towards developing a green standard in the telecom carrier marketplace, where none currently exists. Reports from Insight Research and McKinsey just in the last few months support and advocate telecommunications services as a “right here, right now”, major opportunity as a serious carbon abatement strategy for organizations nationwide and worldwide.

Specifically, we will capitalize on sociological trends such as remote workers, virtual offices, decentralization, and democratization of the work place, alongside newer technologies such as virtual PBX, unified communications, integrated voice and data networks, integrated video/voice/web conferencing to create best practices and a new category that professionals can now include in the list of possibilities for making their company or project more green.

This project is a key element in documenting and researching this area of sustainability. We hope to document best practices in capturing baseline data of an organization’s telecom environmental footprint including firm recommendations on sociological solutions that can actually save money, reduce footprint and create a more flexible and functional communications solution at the same time. 

We will make this first phase publicly available to companies nationwide and around the world and it is our hope that it will actually serve as a catalyst to help start pulling our industry towards a more sustainable stance.  In addition, we will be working with our partners to create the first telecom offset that those not able to change out their practices can at least offset their usage and the downstream power that is used to support phone and Internet services.

Let us know if you want more information on the project, but we will try to keep most of it published along the way on our new partner site at www.justmeans.com , keyword: BetterWorld.

Matt, Jay and the BGI Team

Earlier this week I spoke at the 2008 Green Business Works Expo in Atlanta, great to see such great representation across all aspects of the business and government worlds in Atlanta.  My talk focused on the coming Green Communications revolution that we have begun to implement with many of our customers, saving precious dollars while trimming organization’s carbon footprints at the same time. The many varied topics featured at the expo included everything from LEED, to water conservation, facility cleaning and corporate case studies.

Congratulations to conference organizer Stephanie Armistead and we look forward to next years’ event!  For more information: www.greenbusinessworksexpo.net

Matt