Workshops

Teaching Sustainability Using 'The Natural Step'

March issue of Texas Construction magazine

Lori De La Cruz is the only sustainability expert in the U.S. who is also an Accredited Business Communicator (ABC).

Workshops

The Natural Step works with organizations to pioneer sustainable solutions. We help our partners to integrate sustainability principles into their core strategies, decisions, operations – and bottom line. We work closely with the people inside organizations; people who are dedicated to sustainability and the creation of better organizations in a better world.

By building capacity within organizations, companies come to understand how the current state of the world is impacting business systems, and how, in turn, business systems are impacting the state of the world. We give municipalities and other organizations the tools to make the most of limited resources and move towards successful and sustainable futures. While each organization presents a different challenge, together we are always able to create unique and effective solutions.

Building Awareness and Support

To start your sustainability initiative, you will need to build awareness about what you are trying to achieve and also generate support within your organization for these efforts. Creating a common language to talk about sustainability is an incredibly powerful and important way to make progress on your organization’s journey.

Introductory Workshop (1 day)
“Sustainability” is the buzz-word of our decade, but how do you know what sustainability really is? What are the challenges and opportunities facing organizations in the future? This workshop will give you an understanding of sustainability, show you how other leading organizations are successfully taking strategic actions towards sustainability and start you and your organization on your own journey. PDF with full description.

Strategy Development and Implementation

Ultimately, we aim to shift an organization's thinking away from the piecemeal management of immediate problems to the creation of a long term and strategic plan toward sustainability.

Strategic Sustainability Workshop
Often when we make plans in our organization, community or business, we do it by forecasting. We gather information, trends and observations to help us create a picture of where we think we are heading, then we try and position ourselves so that we are in an advantageous spot in coming years. But what happens if we want, or need, a very different future than current trends project, as with sustainability? For this, The Natural Step uses a very different way of planning the future called backcasting, where we start with our envisioned future as the beginning point for our planning.

We provide training to build your capacity to understand and apply the concept of backcasting from sustainability principles to your organization, community or business. This training builds the capacity of your team to identify gaps between your current reality and where you would like to be in relation to sustainability and also to create a prioritized action plan. PDF with full description.

Additional workshops will be added soon.