Newsletter Team  

Katie Cavert

Copy Editor:

Carolyn Keefe

Contributors:

Katie Cavert

Maggie Cramer

Carolyn Keefe

Sara Landry

Mission Statement:

The Blue Ridge Sustainability Institute drives knowledge into action, solving societal problems today for generations to come by harnessing world-class environmental, economic, and energy research to support collaborations among researchers, educators, entrepreneurs, government officials, and community activists.

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BRSI's

Definition of Sustainability

The Blue Ridge Sustainability Institute is an advocate and catalyst for actions that make the earth more sustainable.  Sustainability means creating and maintaining conditions under which humans and nature can exist in productive harmony, that permit fulfilling social, economic and environmental requirements of present and future generations. 

Board of Directors

 Sponsors: 

BRSI Profile

We have an amazing collection of talented professionals who contribute their time and resources to the management and development of BRSI projects and programs. 

This month's featured member is:

Carolyn Keefe

Copy Editor

Thank you, Brandee, for your contributions!

BRSI Sponsor Profile

We owe much appreciation to our sponsors who are instrumental to our existence and development. 

This month's featured sponsor is:

Conrad Industries

Thank you, Conrad Industries,

for your support!

BRSI Partners and Collaborators

LEADERSHIP GROUP

Click here for a 2012 schedule and topics

ADVISORY COUNCIL

(Co-Chair) 

(Director of Smith Mill Creek Permaculture School)

(Director of the North Carolina Arboretum)

(Retired, Former Western North Carolina Marketing Director, Self-Help Ventures Fund)

(Robert J. Deutsch, PA)

(Green Jobs Director, Asheville Buncombe Community Christian   Ministry)

(Partner, Integritive)

(Owner, Sundance Power Systems)

(President, Ridgetop Associates)

(Director, FLS Solar Technologies) 

Janell Kapoor

(Spokesperson and Coordinator, Ashevillage)

(Transit Project Manager, City of Asheville)

(Director of Integrative Healthcare, Mission Hospitals)

(EcoBuilders Founder)

(Vice President, Entrepreneurship & AdvantageGreen)

(Professor and Director of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Wake Forest School of Medicine)

(Managing Director, The Nauhaus Institute)

(Former Director, LGS, Land of Sky Regional Council of Government)

Comments?

WNC's Abounding Assets

BRSI acknowledges those in the region who contribute to a positive, sustainable future.  This month, we feature:

Lots!First off, let us introduce ourselves: We're ASAP, an Asheville-based nonprofit serving the Southern Appalachian region with a mission to help local farms thrive, link farmers to markets and supporters, and build healthy communities through connections to local food.What are we working on now and how can you get involved? Glad you asked:

• Our 2012 Local Food Guide-a free directory of the area's family farms, tailgate markets, and businesses that use local agricultural products-is on stands at more than 400 area locations. Find a list of pickup spots on our main website, asapconnections.org, or search our online guide at appalachiangrown.org.
• We hope you'll get local with us at our upcoming Get Local events! This month, on July 12 and July 19, Ultimate Ice Cream and The Hop will feature ice creams made with local blackberries, blueberries, mulberries, and raspberries in honor of berry month.
• Our annual Farm Tour will be here soon, September 22-23.Over the weekend, the gates and barns of WNC farms open to the public-even those that don't normally allow visitors-for chances to learn how food grows, taste farm-fresh treats, interact with farm animals, and meet our community's food producers.Browse a list of participating farms and get more information at asapconnections.org.
• We're always in need of volunteers, especially for events like the Farm Tour! And, we offer internships each season. Find more information about these opportunities at asapconnections.org.

Also stay tuned to asapconnections.org through the end of the year for details about our new Local Food Research Center. The center is researching and testing our theory of food system change: that localizing food systems strengthens local economies, boosts farm profitability, increases sustainable production practices, and improves individual and public health. To learn more about our Growing Minds Farm to School Program, which is offering community cooking demonstrations while school is out for the summer, visit growing-minds.org.

Just want to join in the local food conversation, learn about other local food and farm events, or find out what's fresh at farmers tailgate markets? Visit our community website, designed just for you, at fromhere.org.   

Carolyn Keefe joined BRSI after hearing members of its Leadership Group make a presentation at the North Carolina Center for Creative Retirement in 2011, finding a niche as Copy Editor. Carolyn copy edits BRSI's monthly newsletters and important BRSI documents such as the Annual Report. BRSI appreciates Carolyn's eye for detail, her flexibility, and her willingness to jump right in to a role. She brings new ideas to the table. If you are a poet, she would enjoy compiling an Environmental Poems section for future newsletters.

Carolyn moved to Asheville in September 2010, a year after retiring from full-time teaching in the English Program at Lindsey Wilson College (LWC), a private liberal arts college in Columbia, Kentucky, and four months after being awarded Professor Emerita status at LWC. She earned two advanced degrees from Bowling Green State University (Ohio)-an M.A. in General Experimental Psychology (1968) and a Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Composition (1997)-and taught psychology at community colleges in Massachusetts and New York before her eventual tenure at LWC. She was also apprenticed to a hand-spinner and studied American Sign Language in Colorado in the late 1970's and was an avid curler in Ohio from 1980-1990. Among the places she has lived are Saskatoon, Saskatchewan; Waterville, Maine; and Victoria, British Columbia.

Carolyn credits her mother with instilling in her the importance of being a good steward of the environment, learning long before it was fashionable the merits of turning off lights and appliances that weren't in use, not littering or letting water run (or flushing toilets) unnecessarily, and recycling. She admits to being embarrassed when her mother first started to wander around Bowling Green collecting and bagging aluminum cans to redeem at the local recycling center (money she subsequently donated to local organizations); however, in time Carolyn grew not only to admire and respect her mother's quiet activism but to emulate it in her own efforts to teach by example. In addition to initiating the annual Earth Day Celebration at LWC, she discovered she could be an environmental advocate in the classroom. She taught a course called Literature of the Natural World that enabled her to introduce students to the work of writers who held various aspects of the environment in high esteem; and she created assignments in freshman writing courses that asked students to recommend actions the college could take to better care for the campus environment. In the fall of her last year at LWC, she recommended Missing Mountains as the text for Freshman Seminar-a required course for all first-year students; invited four Kentucky activists to visit campus and speak in a public forum about their efforts to halt mountaintop removal; and asked the students in her own classes to write about their impressions of/reactions to what they had learned about mountaintop removal.

In addition to her work with BRSI, Carolyn is a member of the Astronomy Club and WENOCA (the local chapter of the Sierra Club), two other organizations whose efforts on behalf of the environment-especially locally-inspire and uplift her.

Carolyn is moving back to Kentucky, but will still be involved as the Copy Editor from afar. We will miss you!

Thank you Carolyn for your continued dedication to BRSI!

BRSI Sponsor Profile: 

Conrad Industries, also known as A-B Emblem, is one of the largest embroidery companies in the world, and yet it still remains a family run business in the western North Carolina mountains. This fifth generation, family owned company makes all kinds of patches and emblems, including those for the Boy Scouts of America, and has been the sole NASA mission patch contractor since 1970.   Conrad Industries was a founding corporate sponsor of BRSI's 2011 Finance Summit, a meeting convened to increase alignment amongst the many regional energy initiatives, address larger-scale collective marketing efforts for promoting and publicizing energy initiatives, and develop more accessible regional energy financing mechanisms.  

Participants of the Finance Summit  toured Conrad Industries' rooftop solar.

 

Thank you Conrad Industries for your support of the Blue Ridge Sustainability Institute and renewable energy production in the region! 

BRSI's monthly newsletter Knowledge Into Action  is made possible by a generous donation from the 

James McClure Clarke Fund

Thank you for your dedication to sustainability in Western North Carolina!