Blog posts by Jeffrey Hollender,
featuring posts about sustainability,
social responsibility, entrepreneurship,
and more.

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Recent Posts

Rethinking Consumption Across the Globe

For those in the sustainable products industry, it has been a long running and often elusive challenge to understand the role consumers play in creating a thriving “green” marketplace. During the holiday season when shopping reaches a fever pitch is perhaps the most...

The most evil organization in the world

I’ve said it before, but this quote floored me. Never expected this much transparency from one of the world’s most opaque organizations, the US Chamber of Commerce. From the Washington Monthly:  [A] large part of what the Chamber sells is political cover. For...

Seventh Generation’s “Tribute to a Visionary”

After a two year absence, I was invited to return to Seventh Generation to celebrate my induction into the Social Venture Network Hall of Fame. I was honored when Seventh Generation CEO John Replogle gave an exceptional speech to commemorate the occasion and I thought...

Survey: Sex, Condoms and Sustainability

These days, many products—personal care items, food, etc.—contain various chemicals and additives that, while legal in small amounts, may have effects on human health that aren't fully understood. One area that has not received much attention is condoms. Please...

CEO Activist, or Just Another PR Stunt?

In late September of this year, H&M CEO Karl-Johan Persson met with People’s Republic of Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to discuss an increase in textile worker wages and recommend annual wage reviews. Why would the CEO of a successful fashion giant want...

Impact Investing 101

Sara Johnson, a Village Capital program associate, has provided all who want an introduction, guide and overview to Impact Investing a great service by selecting the 17 best articles she discovered in her own exploration of the field. As she wrote in her introduction,...

A Man That the Universe Will Miss

Gregor Barnum, my close friend, recently passed away. Gregor was a self-discoverer, a psychoanalyst of himself and of others. He was kind and gentle, though his mind was bold and audacious. He had a sixth sense for finding good people, and just as acute a sense of...

The Vanishing Entrepreneur

Kudos to Ed Kilgore, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly, for his review of “The Slow-Motion Collapse of American Entrepreneurship,"  by New America Foundation’s Barry Lynn and Lina Khan. The insightful article, which appeared in Washington Monthly’s...

Creating Good Work

Cheryl L. Dorsey, the president of Echoing Green, notes in her forward to Ron Schultz’s latest book Creating Good Work that it arrives at a critical time in the relatively short history of the social entrepreneurial movement. As Jeff Trexler points out in his...

Made in Africa

TOMS Shoes has taken no shortage of heat for the lack of sustainability of its business model. As Cheryl Davenport writes in her Fast Company story, “The Toms buy-one-give-one model does not actually solve a social problem. An increasing number of foreign aid...

Towards Zero Impact Growth

Most of what passes for “sustainability” isn’t actually sustainable at all. We have endlessly – and dangerously confused – “less bad” with “good.” Whether looking at a product or a company, sustainability ends up being mostly about less pollution, less waste, and the...

Full Cost Accounting

Our current system of pricing products and services ensures that society perpetually makes poor choices. Today we exclude most of the adverse social and environmental costs of producing goods from their price. The cost to clean up the groundwater pollution resulting...

The Price of Inequality

"Much of what has gone on can only be described by the words ‘moral deprivation.’ Something wrong happened to the moral compass of so many people working in the financial sector and elsewhere."   The Price of Inequality, Joseph E. Stiglitz By now we know most of...

At the Democratic Convention

Leaving Vermont yesterday, I never made it to Charlotte for the Democratic National Convention. After a five-hour delay in Washington, I gave up and spent the night. The delay allowed me to briefly watch the Convention and hear Julian Castro, the mayor of San Antonio...

Our Future Depends On This!

No question about it, money in politics is destroying our democracy, corrupting our national priorities, and placing the future of our nation in jeopardy. Big money has become one of the most dangerous forces we face -- and the problem is only getting worse....

Let’s Draft Our Kids

As we explore and innovate new solutions to the social and environmental problems we face, sometimes we have to think way outside the box. Where are there assets and resources laying idle, underused, or mis-deployed that could be captured to address our many...

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