ShoreBank Blog

Triple Bottom Line Your Summer

by Sarah on June 8th, 2010

Raise your hand if you spent your adolescent summers doing household chores, attending camps, or volunteering? Do you still summer like that? I don’t. After years of Girl Scouts service projects, band camp attendance, and hours of daily household chores, I now do little more in the summer than pack organic picnic baskets and attend free concerts in the park. But what if I put the baskets away and actually created a to-do list similar to the one I had as a youth, only with a triple bottom line goal instead? What impact could I make with these summer 2010 triple bottom line to-dos?:

Financial:

• “Green” clean my finances. I am going to sign up for as many autopilot online and paperless banking products as I can.
• “Green” my budget. I need to revamp my food, housing, and entertainment budgets for the appropriate amount of organic product, air conditioning (or in my case – a lack there of), and travel expenditures.
• Re-evaluate my 401(K) to participate in socially responsible investments. I did evaluate my 401(K) as promised in my 2010 resolutions; however, I want to verify that my portfolio has not modified in whom it invests and re-adjust my investments accordingly.
• Go 2 weekends without drinking non-water beverage and donate the savings. According to MSN Money, Americans spend more on beer from Memorial Day through Labor Day than at any other time of the year. There is more than one nonprofit that can use my donation.

Community:

• Meet My Neighbors. Not only does it improve community cohesion, but it also increases my safety, as neighbors you know are more likely to alert you if there is suspicious behavior around your neighborhood.
• Support local businesses at street festivals. Street festivals can really provide an economic impact for a community.
• Volunteer for at least 4 hours per month. Volunteers reduce organizational cost while helping to improve the community. And when a community is doing well as a whole, its individuals are better off, too.

Environment:

• Pick up litter for at least one hour. According to Every Monday Matters, if every person picked up one piece of litter today, there would be over 300 million fewer pieces of litter.
• Invest in a urban window garden. I still haven’t completed this resolution! But I think I have added another 3,000 pounds of CO2 from flying this year. It is time.
• Eco-shred all of my hoarded paper. I don’t know how paper adds up, but somehow, all of a sudden, I have stacks of unsolicited credit card offers and napkins everywhere!

Think about the impact that I alone can make with this triple bottom line to-do list! Help me stay on track and join me in becoming a triple bottom line summer activist. The “What does ‘Green’ mean to me?” Facebook photo contest runners up have already gotten on board! Who else is with me?

“What does ‘Green’ mean to me” Facebook Contest Runners Up Photos:

Tags: community development, green banking, socially responsible investing, triple bottom line

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 8th, 2010 and is filed under Outreach. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.