The Business Imperative for Community Practitioners to"Go Green" / Everybody is going green but why should you incorporate it into your giving strategy? Is it possible to align the green interests of your company with your charitable interests? Should you manage your company’s green team? How can practitioners provide value to the company by aligning the two efforts? / The panel of practitioners discuss how to incorporate environmental elements into traditional programs, as well as provide insight into addressing business imperatives such as carbon reduction and maximizing business dollars. / The Entrepreneurs Foundation (EF) Corporate Citizenship Conference is for companies to develop and strengthen their community involvement and philanthropy programs.
The Conference showcases corporate citizenship programs from a variety of large and small, public and private companies, and other celebrated experts who will address issues, trends, metrics, and best practices.
Bio
Colleen Cassity
Colleen Cassity is the director of the Oracle Education Foundation, a nonprofit organization funded by Oracle Corporation. Cassity serves on the board of directors of Juma Ventures (2005) and on the education committee of the San Francisco Giants' Community Fund (2003-2005). She joined the board of directors of the San Francisco Historical Society in 2005.
Cassity is also a member of the advisory board of GenArt San Francisco, an organization that supports emerging visual artists, filmmakers and fashion designers (2000-2005).
Sid Espinosa
Sid Espinosa is Mayor of Palo Alto, CA. Espinosa is also the Former Director of Global Social Investment Programs for Hewlett-Packard Company.
Tonie Hansen
Tonie Hansen has been at NVIDIA since 2006 and oversees social responsibility programs, including managing the NVIDIA Foundation, and serving as communications and program manager for the company's Visualize Green initiative.
She has 19 years of marketing and program management experience in Internet marketing, consumer technology, corporate events and philanthropy. She earned her MBA in 2000 from Babson College.
In her personal pursuits, she is passionate about environmental causes and serves on the judging committee of the California Clean Tech Open. She’s currently working to build partnerships among community colleges and high schools so that low income youth can gain greater exposure to careers in the green collar and digital economies. Living in the paradise that is Northern California, she prefers whenever possible to be outside hiking, golfing or horseback riding.
Rupesh Shah
Rupesh D. Shah is the Director of Corporate Sustainability at Intuit. Intuit is a leading software solutions provider and the makers of TurboTax, QuickBooks, and Quicken.
Shah has held the position of Director of Corporate Sustainability at Intuit for just about a year. Prior to that, he was Director of Product Management for TurboTax Business products and previously he helped to create and launch new industry-specific versions of QuickBooks. Rupesh has also served as Manager of Learning and Development at Odwalla and Training Manager at Earth Train, an environmental nonprofit organization dedicated to providing youth leaders the skills, resources, and network to make a difference in their local communities. Rupesh has also consulted for AmeriCorps, the Presidio Leadership Center, the Corporation for National Service, Gorbachev Foundation, the United Nations and various other leading social organizations around the world.
Shah has a MBA from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management, Northwestern University, and a BA from the University of California, San Diego.
David Yarnold
As Executive Director, David Yarnold is responsible for all operations of Environmental Defense Fund, a leading national nonprofit with 300 employees, 500,000 members and a $75 million budget.
Yarnold is a boundary-crosser, an NGO leader from the for-profit ranks, having joined EDF in 2005 after nearly 27 years at the San Jose Mercury News. He authored EDF's California strategy and was a key leader in the passage of the nation's most sweeping climate change legislation.
Yarnold has sharpened and strengthened the unique EDF approach of harmonizing corporate profitability and environmental benefits. In 2006, he announced EDF would be the first environmental advocacy group to open an office in Bentonville, Arkansas, to influence Wal-Mart's environmental practices.
A Pulitzer Prize-winning editor, Yarnold helped make the Mercury News one of the nation's most acclaimed publications, ranked among the 10 best papers nationally and called by one international organization "America's boldest newspaper." As Executive Editor, he managed a global newsroom of more than 400 people while chronicling the rise of Silicon Valley.
He has appeared on CNN, MSNBC, BBC, the PBS News Hour and elsewhere. He has spoken at numerous conferences on diversity in the environmental movement and served as a guest instructor at the nation's leading journalism training institutes on topics ranging from diversity to building a high-performance culture.
He is on the board of directors of the American Leadership Forum Silicon Valley, EcoAmerica and the Stanford University Graduate School of Businesses' Center for Social Innovation.
Advocacy of the preservation or improvement of the natural environment, especially the social and political movement to control environmental pollution. Other specific goals of environmentalism include control of human population growth, conservation of natural resources, restriction of the negative effects of modern technology, and the adoption of environmentally benign forms of political and economic organization. Environmental advocacy at the international level by nongovernmental organizations and some states has resulted in treaties, conventions, and other instruments of environmental law addressing problems such as global warming, the depletion of the ozone layer, and the danger of transboundary pollution from nuclear accidents. Influential U.S. and British environmentalists have included Thomas Robert Malthus, John Muir, Rachel Carson, Barry Commoner, Paul R. Ehrlich, and Edward O. Wilson. In the social sciences, the term refers to any theory that emphasizes the importance of environmental factors in the development of culture and society.
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