Bainbridge Graduate Institute Offers the First Sustainable Business Graduate School

Bainbridge Graduate Institute (BGI) is the first graduate school devoted to sustainable business. Although a number of other schools have developed programs with a focus on the environment, BGI offers an MBA education that fully integrates environmental and social responsibility into all of its courses. The BGI learning community approach combines face-to-face and distance learning methods to serve students who live and work in any location.

BGI prepares leaders from diverse backgrounds to succeed in creating and managing environmentally and socially responsible (ESR) businesses and nonprofit ventures. BGI students are dedicated to bringing sustainability into the workplace, and in many cases are already doing so. Current students include the chairman of a public utility, present and former senior sustainability managers at Hewlett Packard and Shell, successful entrepreneurs, the founders of the world’s leading co-housing company, engineers, a documentary film-maker and a fascinating variety of other professionals, activists, and business people.

Drawing on thought leaders from many communities, BGI’s faculty includes corporate leaders, environmental educators and activists, sustainable business academics, entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, organizational consultants, change agents, scientists and technologists. The faculty includes many leaders in sustainability including Amory Lovins, co-author of Natural Capitalism, resource conservation guru and co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute; Elisabet Sahtouris, evolutionary biologist and author of A Journey Through Time and Earthdance; and John D. Adams, author of Thinking Today as if Tomorrow Mattered and head of Sustainability programs and the Organizational Systems department of Saybrook Graduate School.

The first class kicked off in 2002 on the school’s summer campus, a 140 acre water-access-only ecovillage on Cortes Island, B.C. There students took solar showers, learned permaculture, and began their courses with lights, equipment, and computer network all run on solar power. By the end of the first eight-day intensive a deep learning community had formed in which the students began taking charge of their own learning experience.

BGI students find their learning is quickly applicable in the real world. James Soares entered the BGI MBA program last September. During his first two quarters of study, he initiated significant changes at the family of companies where he works which includes several Ben & Jerry stores and a brew pub in Salt Lake City. He began by applying organization development principles to improving management communication patterns, and was promptly given an award for the year’s achievement by Ben and Jerry’s. Next, working with the principles of industrial ecology, James went on to shift the low-value disposal of a brewing by-product (spent grain) into a series of higher-value process inputs. Some of the spent grain is now enhancing the brew pub’s dinner rolls, and experimentation is underway for using the grain as a substrate for growing shiitake mushrooms.

BGI was founded in 2002 by Elizabeth and Gifford Pinchot and Dr. Sherman Severin, Ph.D. The Pinchots have worked for over twenty years as educators in innovation for business, nonprofits and government agencies. Gifford Pinchot has helped launch 700 ventures, conducted innovation courses in over half of the Fortune 100 corporations in the U.S. and in numerous enterprises abroad, and is the best-selling author of Intrapreneuring: Why You Don’t Have to Leave the Corporation to Become an Entrepreneur, published in over 15 languages and widely used by business schools.

While working together in the Pinchots’ consulting practice, the founders conceived the idea of a business school devoted to integrating traditional business tools with a deep concern for the environment and human well-being. The idea was to take everything they had learned in years of business and educational success and apply it to building a better world. Beyond preparing students directly, BGI is developing curriculum and encouraging other business schools to bring social and environmental responsibility into their programs.

BGI is accepting applications until August 11 for the Fall 2003 academic year.

To learn more about BGI’s MBA program: www.bgiedu.org
Contact: Terry Chasteen: info@bgiedu.org
(206) 855-9559