Episode 18 :: Coffee As A Virtue

Stephan von Kolkow and Laurie Britton, co-owners of the cleverly named Cafe Virtuoso, believe in delivering quality coffee and tea products primarily to wholesale customers. Their product line is all organic, and since October is Fair Trade month, we wanted to talk to them about that. How did Fair Trade look to them as businesspeople with a bottom line to mind?

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Episode 16 :: A Chaplain for a New Century

Lauren Van Ham has had a love affair with the natural world and has found renewal from being there. She has worked in nonprofit and for-profit settings, ministry settings, corporate settings, and has found herself instructing WalMart employees and management in what sustainablity means on a personal level. After some eye opening experiences showing her the great need for someone tuned into the needs of the Earth, she decided to recommit herself as an “eco-chaplain,” even re-ritualizing her ordination to solidify her commitment outwardly.

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Episode 14 :: Last Acts of Caring

This show features Eric Putt and Andrea Deerheart of Thresholds, a mortuary service that provides home- and family-directed funerals that put the human dimension back into taking care of the deceased—a real alternative to the commercial funeral industry, which by intent or accident has usurped the role of loved ones to care-fully tend to the body.

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Episode 12 :: Teaching Triple Bottom Line

How are business majors being trained for the marketplace in the new context shaped by Earth’s pushback on unlimited growth business models? That’s where The Common Good goes in this episode with guest Harry Watkins, Professor of Strategy and Sustainability at the Fermanian School of Business, Point Loma Nazarene University, San Diego. Harry tells us about his “a ha” moments that moved him to a passion for incorporating the people and planet into the bottom line, and the drive to get others on board with the triple bottom line.

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Episode 11 :: Green Investing

Jan Schalkwijk kicked off his financial advisor career in the traditional mold. But after a sweeping tour of the world in 2005, he came back energized to approach his career life with new vision for how to keep moving people toward sound investments but with an added criterion: to invest in companies and ventures that have the sustainable ethic in mind.

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Episode 10 :: Cooperatives

This month our guest is Nancy Cassidy, the General Manager of the Ocean Beach People’s Organic Food Market, a cooperatively owned retail store in San Diego. OB People’s concentrates in selling vegetarian food, but the cooperative as a business model can be applied to any kind of business that is now run by a corporation. The difference of course, is that shares are held in a one-owner, one share manner and no one can accumulate shares and the influence that goes with them.

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Episode 4 :: Market as a Functional Religion

This show looks at how we can see the Market and the macroeconomic picture as a functional religion. That is, how it takes on deity-like qualities, and is supported by figures akin to high priests, and has with it a narrative mythology of progress, ultimate worth, sin, and so on.

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