by Willy Franzen on October 27, 2008
The great thing about living in downtown Chicago is that I’m constantly bombarded with new ideas for companies to feature here. In suburban Connecticut most of what I saw when I was driving around was trees. Here in Chicago there are few trees in sight, but plenty of businesses, billboards, and buses (with advertising on the side, of course). There are also plenty of taxes. Sales tax is 10.25% and the parking tax is 28%, but likely soon to be 33%. This is on top of already outrageous monthly parking fees, so it’s no wonder that there’s a Zipcar location just a hundred yards down the street from my building. Zipcars are kind of like rental cars, but better. They’re more affordable (I think, but I haven’t done the math), they’re intended for residents instead of travelers, they’re green, and you don’t need to be 25 to take them for a ride. It’s kind of like having a friend with a car except you have to pay that friend whenever you use his car.
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by Willy Franzen on October 18, 2008
Surprise, surprise. We’ve selected yet another one of the Wall Street Journal’s Best Small Workplaces to be featured on One Day, One Job. That’s three in a row for those of you who are counting. We can’t express enough how helpful lists like these can be to your job search. Almost as helpful as Rainforest Alliance is to saving the rainforest. They’re a non-profit organization that “works to conserve biodiversity and ensure sustainable livelihoods by transforming land-use practices, business practices and consumer behavior.” How do they do this? By working directly with farmers, workers, business leaders, NGO’s, governments, scientists and local communities to change the way that they do agriculture to make land use more socially and environmentally responsible while maintaining its economic viability.
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Bolivia,
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Costa Rica,
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guatemala,
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New York,
Nicaragua,
project management,
web development
by Willy Franzen on October 11, 2008
Back in the earlier days of One Day, One Job, we used to occasionally feature companies that didn’t even have any entry level jobs posted. We always made sure to pick really cool companies, and then we would encourage you to do a little extra research and give cold calling a try. We’re going to bring back that practice for today, because we found a non-profit organization that many of you would be totally pumped to work for. It’s the World Cocoa Foundation, a non-profit that “encourages sustainable, responsible cocoa growing.” Investment bankers and consultants can drop the names of their employers all they want, but they’ll never top saying “Oh yeah, I work for the World Cocoa Foundation.” That’s an instant conversation starter.
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Virginia,
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by Willy Franzen on August 30, 2008
If you’ve been reading One Day, One Job for any amount of time, you probably know that I am a fanatical fly fisherman. Anything having to do with fishing catches my interests, so it should be no big surprise that I had to tell you about the Cape Cod Commercial Hook Fishermen’s Association and their entry-level jobs. Most sport fishermen aren’t too fond of commercial fishing in general, but most fishermen also like to eat fish more often than they catch fish. The Cape Cod Commercial Hook Fishermen’s Association is a non-profit organization for fishermen who are doing it right. They limit their catch through the use of less effective fishing techniques to ensure that they preserve the ecosystem and help to improve fish stocks. The members of this organization realize that without a healthy fishery, they won’t be able to feed their families (or our families), so they sacrifice short-term gain for long-term prosperity. The CCCHFA is not a traditional trade association but an environmental non-profit organization.
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by Willy Franzen on August 9, 2008
John James Audubon painted birds. His seminal work, Birds of America, was a collection of 435 life-size prints. To this day, when you hear the name Audubon, you think of birds. Interestingly enough, John James Audubon had no direct involvement with the founding of the National Audubon Society. Audubon’s widow, Lucy, tutored a man named George Bird Grinnell and some of Audubon’s love of birds must have rubbed off, as Grinnell was one of the Audubon Society’s founders. To this day, the Audubon Society persists in its mission “to conserve and restore natural ecosystems, focusing on birds, other wildlife, and their habitats for the benefit of humanity and the earth’s biological diversity.” The Audubon Society works to achieve this mission through a national network of community-based nature centers and chapters and scientific, educational, and advocacy programs.
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Texas,
Washington DC,
zoology
by Willy Franzen on June 21, 2008
Half of the news lately has been about high gas prices. It gets tiring, since the stories never bring a new angle. Oddly enough, gas has been relatively price inelastic until recently. Prices would go up, and people would keep on driving like they did with lower gas prices. We’ve finally hit a point where people are actually cutting back on their driving because gas is so expensive. Although we haven’t done any research to back this up, we’d bet that home energy use is even less price elastic that gasoline use. Most people’s Dad’s yell at them for leaving a light on, but they don’t take serious measures to limit their home energy consumption – it takes too much effort. The Association for Energy Affordability is a New York City based non-profit that promotes energy affordability through conservation in the home.
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by Willy Franzen on June 14, 2008
If you’ve been following us from the start, you know that the first non-profit organization whose jobs we featured was Save Our Wild Salmon. Today we’re going to look at jobs at the Wild Salmon Center, which has quite a few similarities to the aforementioned organization. I decided to do this for two reasons. First, I care deeply about wild salmon and like drawing attention to organizations that help them. Second, I’m leaving for a weeklong fishing trip today and it’s getting me in the mood for fishing (don’t worry, we’ll maintain our daily posting schedule). So let’s talk about how you can make a career out of protecting globally significant salmon ecosystems!
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Oregon
by Willy Franzen on May 25, 2008
I grew up in suburban Connecticut, but I spent a lot time outdoors, both around my house and in more wild places. During my childhood I rarely saw deer, turkeys, coyotes, or hawks. Only a few times did I ever hear or see a woodpecker. Seeing wildlife was special. As I got older that began to change. I see all of the above relatively often now, and I swear that I hear a woodpecker banging away every day now. I definitely consider this a victory for local conservationists who have worked hard to save and bring back wildlife habitats; however, I also know that many species of flora and fauna are still in danger across the world. Conservation International is an organization whose mission statement should be “saving life on Earth.” Instead they have chosen the slightly less terse:
We believe that the Earth’s natural heritage must be maintained if future generations are to thrive spiritually, culturally, and economically. Our mission is to conserve the Earth’s living heritage – our global biodiversity – and to demonstrate that human societies are able to live harmoniously with nature.
Either way, they’re doing great work towards helping the world balance the needs of society with nature.
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by Willy Franzen on May 22, 2008
It’s safe to say that the environment is becoming a big political issue again. If the trend continues, a likely result will be increased government regulation. It’s important that our shared resources are protected, but government regulation often ends up creating intricacies and loopholes that increase the cost of doing business without accomplishing the desired beneficial outcome. It’s easy to say that companies should just suck it up and learn to stop putting the environment at risk, but that point of view fails to look at the whole picture. There are very few people in the world whose livelihoods don’t have an adverse impact on the environment, which means that more restriction can significantly decrease some people’s abilities to put food on the table (it can also significantly decrease a corporation’s ability to put billion dollar profits on the table). Businesses often have to jump through hoops to gain both government and community approval of environmentally sensitive projects, but they rarely retain staff with such specialties. Aspen Environmental Group is a company that provides the required expertise.
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by Willy Franzen on May 1, 2008
My house in college was not energy efficient, unless you consider the heating system’s not working half the time a feature of design. The doors and windows all leaked cold air in the winter, and it was impossible to cool the house down below about 95 degrees in the summer. We even tried covering the windows in the winter for added insulation, but it didn’t help much. Our monthly heating bills were outrageous despite the fact that my roommates were cheap and insisted on turning the thermostat down below the point at which our landlord warned us that the pipes would freeze. Energy efficiency was clearly not a priority for whoever built our house, but if it had been they could have hired someone like Rumsey Engineers to design it.
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California,
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by Willy Franzen on January 25, 2008
Solar power is one of those things that continues to amaze you long after you’re first introduced to it. Even if it’s just a photovoltaic cell connected to a lightbulb, the harnessing of the sun’s power always seems to generate a feeling of child-like amazement. Lucky for our planet, that youthful exuberance has remained in many of today’s entrepreneurs, even after they have grown up. Because of them, it seems that we might soon see the day when solar power moves from something that hobbyists play around with to a real source of sustainable energy.
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