You're Invited! NYWSE Presents: Healthy and Sustainable Living

NYWSE invites you to participate in an engaging conversation about emerging lifestyle trends and the growing awareness of healthy and sustainable living. Register here now before January 27th for an early bird discount!

As a society we are becoming more conscious of the cumulative effects of toxins in our personal spaces and our impact on the environment.  Individuals however may find it difficult to know where and how to start making the necessary changes to transform their habits. Come meet five amazing women who are doing everything in their power to help others navigate this process more effectively.  Our speakers will share their inspiring experience and expert knowledge on environmental health, beauty, retail and product design, while also providing best practices for enabling a healthy body, home and planet.

Please join us in the Organic Avenue event space to learn and discuss the many ways we can integrate healthy and sustainable practices into our daily lives.

Tickets are $10 each until January 27th, and $15 thereafter.  Thanks to SIGG, the first 20 ticket purchasers will receive a complimentary SIGG reusable water bottle!

Also, books written by two of our speakers, Alexandra Zissu and Siobhan O'Connor, will be available for purchase, as well as signing by authors.

We look forward to seeing you on January 31st!

OUR SPEAKERS

Kristen Arnett, Founder of the Green Beauty Team

International makeup artist Kristen Arnett has been immersed in the world of beauty for 15 years, with roles ranging from product development to high-profile fashion work. Her passion is to inspire women to learn more about self-care and personal-esteem. She gives her clients the tools to reveal their individual allure, maximize their assets, and face the world with a new confidence. As a beauty educator, she appears on television, writes articles, speaks and trains people around the globe. Sought after on both the West and East coasts for her “Age-Defying Makeup Techniques,” Ms. Arnett has helped hundreds of women look fresh, revitalized, and years younger without surgery or Botox.  Today, she uses her talents and personal ethics to educate people everywhere about “Green Beauty,” and how they can choose products that are not only effective as cosmetics, but also beneficial to the skin.  From the runway to real life, Ms. Arnett is looking to make a positive difference in how people of all ages consider their own self-care. She created GreenBeautyTeam.com to share her knowledge with women, men, children and aspiring Green makeup artists to make safer, healthier choices about choosing the best in Green Beauty.

Siobhan O'Connor, Environmental health journalist, author and blogger at Nomoredirtylooks.com

Siobhan O'Connor is the co-author of No More Dirty Looks: The Truth About Your Beauty Products and the Ultimate Guide to Safe and Clean Cosmeticsand is Senior Editor at Prevention Magazine, the leading health magazine for women with more than 10 million monthly readers. She is passionate about sustainability, food and helping women make safer—and better—beauty choices for themselves. As a magazine editor for the past ten years in New York, she has edited award-winning features for GOOD magazine and others, writes regularly for many national magazines, and was recently named a Folio Award finalist for feature writing. She has appeared on the TODAY Show, The Doctors, Martha Stewart's Whatever With Alexis and Jennifer, and more than 30 radio shows including NPR's Leonoard Lopate Show and The Kathleen Show, and her book has been featured in New York Magazine, TIME Magazine, Whole Living, US News & World Report, and many others. She blogs daily at Nomoredirtylooks.com, and lives in Brooklyn.

Diane Ruengsorn, Founder of Domestic Aesthetic, an eco-friendly design company

Diane Ruengsorn brings a diverse background of experience that informs her current initiative, the socially and environmentally responsible home furnishings company Domestic Aesthetic. After graduating from Smith College, she began her career as a writer covering technology and business trends. Interviewing political leaders and CEOs of Fortune 500 companies gave her great insight into the issues shaping industry and the environment. Switching to design and receiving a master’s degree from Pratt’s Design Management program, the idea for Domestic Aesthetic was born from Diane’s experiences in the furniture industry. “Live well, live right” is the company’s philosophy that you can have products that enhance your life while taking into account people and our planet. Domestic Aesthetic’s mission is to offer consumers affordable products that adhere to environmentally and socially responsible standards. Since launching last year, the company has been in numerous publications such as New York Magazine, Interior Design, and multiple features in the New York Times. The company's line of eco-luxe housewares can be found in stores across the US, Canada, and Australia including the MoMa Design store.

 Benita Singh, Co-founder of Source4Style, a website for sustainability-conscious designers and retailers

Benita is a fair trade entrepreneur who's been connecting artisans around the world to mainstream markets since her first trip to Guatemala in 2003. While there, she co-founded Mercado Global, the non-profit organization currently providing employment to 300+ women artisans in Guatemala through partnerships with retailers like Levi Strauss & Co., Whole Foods Market and ABC Carpet & Home. After serving as the organization's President for three years, Benita went on to work on the ground with crafts cooperatives across India - consulting on product development, scaling local enterprises to increase production capacity, and ultimately connecting groups across the country to outlets including Barnes and Noble and GAIAM. Newsweek named Benita among the "15 People Who Make America Great" in 2006 and was also named among the "World's Best Emerging Social Entrepreneurs" by Echoing Green. Benita serves on the Board of Nest, a non-profit fair trade organization pioneering the concept of micro-bartering among women artisans for whom microcredit is inaccessible. When she's not cataloging the latest fair trade textile, she can be found running around the park or at any of the City's yoga studios. She graduated from Yale University with degrees in Comparative Literature and International Studies.

Alexandra Zissu, Environmental health journalist and author

Alexandra Zissu is an eco lifestyle expert, writer, speaker, and consultant. She’s the author of The Conscious Kitchen (Clarkson Potter, March 2010)—a Books for a Better Life Awards finalist—and co-author of Planet Home (Clarkson Potter, December 2010), The Complete Organic Pregnancy (Collins, September 2006), and The Butcher’s Guide to Well-Raised Meat (Clarkson Potter, May 2011). She has worked for New York Magazine, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Lifetime and Details magazines, The New York Observer and Women’s Wear Daily. Over the past decade, her stories have also appeared in The New York Times, The Green Guide, Plenty, Cookie, TheDailyGreen.com, Bon Appétit, Health, Vogue, Teen Vogue, Self, Child, Time Out New York, Harperʼs Bazaar and The Huffington Post, among other publications. She speaks often about all things eco-friendly at private firms, mothers' groups, schools, non-profits, and industry expos, and consults about green living for individuals and organizations. Though she should probably be on a biodynamic farm in Vermont, or growing dill in Finland, she actually lives in New York City, across the street from where she grew up, with her (organic) family.

 

Connecting People and the Environment: The Human Impacts Institute

Happy 2011! To kick off the start of a new decade, we feature an excellent interview by former chief blogger and guest contributor Danielle Ravich with Tara Deporte, a leader grassroots sustainability leader and founder of The Human Impacts Institute. Here, Tara discusses her efforts to grow a holistic and inclusive movement that will address sustainability from all angles

by Danielle Ravich

Tara Deporte has been of one of NYC’s most active grassroots sustainability leader I’ve had the opportunity to meet. Through her work at the Lower East Side Ecology center, Tara has extended her passion for sustainability through hosting numerous sustainability workshops, inspiring interns to become environmental leaders throughout NYC, advising local businesses how to use more sustainable practices, teaching middle school students to be environmental stewards, and participating in numerous local policy-making discussions. In her spare time, among others, Tara has worked on grassroots initiatives to support sustainable building programs, convincing building managers to allow composting, worked as an adjunct professor at the New School, and is also an artist.

It seems that collaboration and finding ways to integrate ideas to create solutions is at the cornerstone of what seems to make Tara a success. Her interests both locally and abroad, in addition to her hard work and the momentum she has built throughout the environmental community, has enabled her to house her work in one place: The Human Impacts Institute (http://www.humanimpactsinstitute.org/).

The Human Impacts Institute aims to foster sustainability and creativity through education, collaborative research and creative expression. It encompasses Tara’s passions and represents the type of integrated thinking that creates real change.

The organization’s strengths come from its ability to foster partnerships, and build a transparent holistic and inclusive movement to address sustainability from all angles. Tara has always been involved in a multitude of projects, and launching her own organization to see all of her visions through seemed to be a logical next step. She divided the organization’s actions into four components:

• Experiential education--participants practice leadership through hands-on problem solving and community service. There are opportunities to learn and develop through working with organizations around the world, and even locally in New York City. Already, The Human Impacts Institute has partnered with the Rural Women’s Movement in Africa and will be sending volunteers to work with women-based organizations in Africa who need additional staffing in December.
• Collaborative partnerships--organizations unite through resource sharing, joint advocacy, and idea development. Through shared experiences and goals, both US and abroad, we can better understand needs and develop solutions.
• Participatory research--students provide free research services to the Human Impacts Institute community. Through a partnership with Webster University in the Netherlands, students would have the opportunity to engage in cross-cultural experiences while working directly with professors on environmental research projects.
• Creative expression-- individuals foster creative thinking to reach people through cultural means, and highlight the creativity needed to develop policies that address environmental issues at a holistic level. Though these seem to be a diverse range of issues, they are all aimed at one theme: creating solutions to address environmental sustainability.

When I asked Tara about the best piece of advice she’s received, she recalled an undergraduate advisor telling her that one day she’d have to choose one of her passions. “This was a great piece of advice that really made me think. I agree that we have to focus and choose to some degree, but I choose to be focused in the way I see the world; Everything links together in some way” said Tara.

As someone who can see things from a variety of perspectives, Tara explained that a key barrier to sustainability is that people have a hard time seeing how these issues impact their everyday lives. For example, “It doesn't hit home until you experience exasperated asthma. And sometimes, once it gets personal, it's easy for it to be someone else’s fault; it’s easy to point rather than looking inward and seeing how we contribute. At the same time, it is easy to turn a blind eye when we don’t feel the impacts directly” said Tara.

The process of building the Human Impacts Institute has been both challenging but extremely rewarding at the same time. Some of the challenges that Tara has faced, similar to many entrepreneurs, has been to create an organization that is sustainable in the long term, and finding the right balance of developing a targeted yet flexible mission that encompasses the variety of endeavors that she has set out to accomplish. To Tara, the most rewarding component was realizing how much support she actually had. “It’s been so gratifying to see the number of people who came out of the woodworks to support the organization’s development” said Tara. Through Tara’s efforts, its participants, partners, contributors and stakeholders, the Human Impacts Institute will hopefully build greater connections between people and the environment and build much-needed holistic, constructive and creative solutions.

For powerful PSA’s by the Human Impacts Institute see: http://www.youtube.com/user/HumanImpactsInst