Sustainable Business Oregon |

NWEI Executive Director, Mike Mercer

Sustainable Business Oregon highlighted NWEI’s 20 years of work with the business community in an article published today. Read below for Andy Giegerich’s reflections on how NWEI has been “bringing businesses back to Earth” since 1993. For the full piece, click here.

A key player in Oregon’s early sustainable business movement is marking its second decade this week.

The Northwest Earth Institute, launched by former Stoel Rives LLP attorney Dick Roy and his wife Jeanne, will host its 20th anniversary party May 16th at Portland’s Left Bank Annex. As part of the celebration, the group is unveiling new strategies, including an updated online platform, that Executive Director Mike Mercer believes will move the group to the next level.

The Roys formed the group to push air quality and solid waste issues. Since then, it has also worked to improve Portland neighborhoods, through the Neighborhood Sense of Place Program, and formed the Sustainable Investment Institute as a way to train investment advisers on green issues.

The new Change for Good effort that’ll launch Thursday aims to “close the gap between the sustainability behavior people want to do and what they actually do,” Mercer said…

“This isn’t a solitary pursuit, it’s a social pursuit,” Mercer said. “We want to make it easy for someone who’s busy to get involved.”…Mercer has led the group since 2006 and participated in its programs since the mid-1990s.

“Twenty years ago, people weren’t having this discussion around sustainability,” he said. “It was a small group of change agents, maybe 1 percent or 2 percent of the population. Over the last 20 years, NWEI reached out to the middle part of the population who realized that change is permanent but didn’t know how to get there just yet.”

The group has increasingly focused on the higher education sector, such as faculty members who are incorporating sustainability tenets in their teaching and projects. About half of the group’s 10,000 members are in the higher education realm.

“Four years ago, it was zero” percent, Mercer said. “That’s in recognition of faculty members and institutions saying, we need to educate students for a different future, not just in renewable energy but in terms of dealing with the planet.”