The Savannah Country Day – Creative Minds Lecture Series – Reception before the speech (in the Green room)

Rob Gibson, Marjorie Young, Tom Bonnell

Dr. David Davies, Catherine Rendon, Loren Schoenberg, Marjorie Young

Savannah Country Day School presents Loren Schoenberg, a revered tenor saxophonist and the author of the acclaimed NPR Curious Listeners Guide to Jazz, with his lecture, “Louis Armstrong: The Consummate American.”

Giving a LIVE PR 2.0 demo to SCORE – at the Macon Conference

Al Torpie

Al Worthington

Annette Rodriguez

Barbara Shaheen

Claudia Schmidt

Dick Godschalk

Fred Abood

Gil Hayes

Jay Leavy

Jeff Mesquita

Jim Trott

Jim Zettergrene

Jules Homans

June Fisher

Mac Crow

Marjorie Young

Nancy Cleveland

Terri Denison

Tom Clark

Atlanta, Augusta, Columbus, Dalton and Savannah SCORE offices in attendance

This is how HOLLYWOOD RON WATCHES THE OSCARS

Dan, Jeanie, Ron and David

24E HOSTS ANOTHER GREAT PRIVATE PARTY for the SCAD Furniture Design Show

Joe Ippolito putting up our signs on the front door

213 West York Street – right next to the Jepson on Telfair Square

Reception for Dr Kathy Love at Savannah Tech

Chef Matt Cohen, Gail Eubanks and Chef (from France!)

Curt, Candance and Celia Dunn

Malik and Marjorie

Small Business Chamber – Lecture on PR 2.0

Lecture on PR

I want to thank Chris, Joe, Lisa and Burton for helping with the lecture

Italia?. nope.. heading from 516 to the airport – Garden City

Dinner party for StoryCorps in Savannah – at Catherine Rendon’s home

Paul Work and Alex Kelley from StoryCorps in Savannah, GA / NPR

Bobby, Catherine and Bobby’s mother from NJ

Valentines Weekend 2009 in Savannah

Mirko Fenu at a bakery in Florence

The San Lorenzo market

A Beautiful evening in Florence

Home Sweet Home

I flew home on a 757. At first I was nervous about flying across the Atlantic in this small aircraft, but it was GREAT. Had three seats to myself.

Up at 4am with jetlag.

busy week ahead

Spent the afternoon in Florence, Italy- showing Mirko PR 2.0

Mirko is a young,, new attorney in Florence. Last year there were 3500 people who took the bar exam in Tuscany, he scored the highest out of all of them. CONGRATULATIONS MIRKO FENU.

I am having a wonderful time shopping in Florence. Feels great to be back here. When I was 19, I spent 3 month studying art in the Italian school near the San Lorenzo market. Then when I was 21, I moved to Tirrenia, Italy for 3 years. Tirrenia is a great little seaside resort town near Pisa.

Heading to Lake Como on the 1pm train.

blog by Martin Melaver: funding green / leed projects

The Business of “Yes”

www.melaver.com

I desperately needed to doodle. Or scream. Or just plain bolt the room (which I finally did). I was in Boston this past week, at a meeting of well-intentioned sustainable real estate developers and a nascent socially-responding financing group, talking about creating a different type of fund that would truly address environmental and communal needs. The intent was good. And yet here I was, a long way from home, listening to a highly self-regarded developer drone on and on about how his development would be the answer to everyone’s prayers, were it not for the perverse practices of the financial markets.

What is it about us real estate developers that makes us the wildebeest of the human kingdom, a cross between the narcissism of the master architect and the hucksterism of a used-car salesman? More to the point, at what point are we going to get beyond railing at all the damaging practices of our profession (and there are plenty) to  embrace some of the big positive ideas now floating out there among policy-makers and thought-leaders?

To be fair, our meeting that day was moving us in the direction of “yes.” I think we all recognized, eventually, that we needed a funding mechanism that connected rather than siloed investors, fund managers, developers, and community stakeholders. And that rather than a short-term exit strategy, this fund needed to be flexible enough to stay invested for the long-term. And that this fund needed to be robust enough to provide not only equity and debt but additional tranches of capital to assist with community programs, land conservation strategies, and the like.

So, despite my general fidgetiness and lack of patience over being lectured to by one of my colleagues, we were making some ground. And, who knows, we might just come up with the Big Idea for responsible property investing. If so, it might well behoove us, for once, to look beyond the self-absorbed enclave of our own profession to some visionary concepts now being floated out there. I can think of 5 that merit serious attention:

1.                  The creation of trusts for our commons € natural, social, and communal. The concept comes from Peter Barnes’ brilliant work Capitalism 3.0 (2006) and provides a roadmap for how to upgrade our economic operating system, serve as trustees for shared resources, and redress social inequities.

2.                  Linking economic stability/job creation to a green agenda. This concept is already starting to get a good bit of play in the Obama administration. On the up side is the $100 billion of economic stimulus slated for green projects. On the potential downside is the Congressional Budget Office recommendation that we waive requirements for environmental review in order to accelerate infrastructural spending. The two need to go hand in hand. Van Jones’ recent book The Green-Collar Economy points the way for business-environment synergies.

3.                  A strong carrot-and-stick governmental agenda on energy, adopting either Gore’s bold goal of 100% alternatives by 2018 or the still challenging goal of “80 by 50” (80% carbon reductions by 2050). An important voice here is George Monbiot’s Heat, which looks at strategies for the UK to reduce its own carbon emissions 90% by 2030. On the table are the following: a carbon tax or cap-and-trade policy, long-term dependable incentives for alternative forms of energy (while eliminating perverse subsidies for oil, gas, agribusiness), establishment of a federal renewable energy portfolio standard, tax credits and government loan programs for energy retrofits of commercial and residential buildings, investment in transportation infrastructure focused not on roads but mass transit, investment in a smart-grid system.

4.                  Looking beyond national borders to global solutions, primarily by linking issues of poverty and basic health to environmental stewardship. The go-to read here is probably Jeffrey Sachs’ Common Wealth.

5.                  At the other end of the spectrum is localization: Taking stock of the unique assets of place and people and leveraging local uniqueness to keep capital within a community for all in the community. Michael Shuman’s The Small-Mart Revolution and Wiland & Bell’s Edens Lost and Found provide good pragmatic approaches to shaping collective action at the local level.

Bottom line: There are some brilliant, positive, can-do ideas and practices out there beyond the narrow confines of my own real-estate profession. We simply need to shed our not-invented-here parochialism and embrace some of the best thinking coming from other sectors of society. Couldn’t think of a better time than now to make that happen.

This isn’t Savannah

wow, what a fashion statement!

Orlando Stuart, 16 months

Ian, Orlando and Elanoria Stuart

I have lots of lectures coming up – one in Austin, two in Atlanta – and this one in Savannah

The Small Business Chamber’s Lunch & Learn will be held on  February 16th, Noon in the Community Room at the Savannah Mall. Guest speaker, Marjorie Young, President of Carriage Trade Public Relations, Inc will give a Lecture on 10 Proven Online PR Methods vs Traditional PR. She will talk about how to get your articles and press releases to rank in Google, the importance of blogs, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin, Flicker, Wikipedia, Podcasts and Skype. You will learn how to increase your visibility and credibility online through proven PR techniques.

Marjorie Young is a frequent speaker on Community PR.  She sits on the Boards of; The Savannah Area Chamber of Commerce, Leadership Savannah, SCORE, and Rotary starting in June 2009. In 2006, The Savannah Area Chamber of Commerce named her Entrepreneur of the Year. Carriage Trade Public Relations, Inc., established in 1995, is a full service PR agency that specializes in community visibility and good news about your company online. For more information visit http://www.carriagetradepr.com or call 912.844.9990.

Snowing on Lake Como

I arrived into Milano Malpensa airport after a perfect QUICK flight of 7 hours and six minutes. We had a BIG tailwind. It usually takes 8 hours.

Uncle Chris made Artichoke Soup (simple but GREAT)

put heart of artichokes, cut into 4 pieces, add one carrot or a whole onion, and salt. Cook 20 minutes to a slow boil, then turn it off and let it sit for 1/2 an hour. Serve with parmesan cheese.

I leave for Florence on Tuesday, to meet a group of lawyers who own a  law firm- to talk about community PR and online PR. Home on Saturday (maybe)

Working on Community Headlines today – for distribution tomorrow.

Enjoying a cup of English Breakfast tea while looking out over the lake. The snow is coming down gently.