MarketShift Strategies Shares Insights at BEST Business Center Carbon Footprint Workshop for Businesses
Keeping pace with rapid-change created by investments in a low-carbon economy is a significant challenge facing both traditional and new business models. Throughout this dramatic transition, nimble companies anticipate and prepare for complex policy, partnerships, programs and technologies that will have a direct impact on the organization's future viability. 
Armed with understanding, but lacking a compass - companies frequently don't know where to begin, or how to implement carbon-reduction ideas across the entire organization. Applying new technology and creative thinking can elevate a company’s efficiency and success in a sustainable economy.
MarketShift Strategies addressed this topic during June's Carbon Footprint Workshop for Businesses, presented by the BEST Business Center. The three-part educational series was designed to help businesses reduce carbon footprints, save money and distinguish themselves as climate champions. Participating businesses were diverse in scope and size - signaling a broad and common interest to improve, embrace and capitalize on the benefit of reduced carbon footprints.
Represented sectors included insurance, nonprofit, manufacturing, hospitality and technology - all seeking guidance and clarity in navigating the complex, low-carbon economic terrain.
MarketShift offers business leaders a recipe for successfully preparing and positioning for low-carbon business strategies and operations:
- Alignment - Incorporate carbon offsetting into enterprise-wide business strategies.
- Relevance - Identify short- and long-term benefits of sustainable business operations, and translate those actions into simple, meaningful terms and imagery.
- Credibility - Avoid greenwashing by walking and talking a fully foundered, genuine green brand.
- Documentation - Whether recording the journey or charting its outcomes, new technologies and knowledge-sharing networks can help preserve processes and findings.
- Collaboration - Identify champions and join with like-minded sustainable businesses leaders to amplify the volume of low-carbon stories through the power of partnership.
The BEST Business center - or Businesses for an Environmentally Sustainable Tomorrow - guides Portland's small businesses toward a profitable green future. A sector of the City of Portland Bureau of Planing and Sustainability, the center supports the city's mission to continually reduce the overall carbon footprint of its community by proliferating the adoption of best practices in sustainability.
BEST businesses adoption of low-carbon business strategies is a source of inspiration AND pragmatism for other cities to consider around the globe.
To learn more about the mission, projects and services of the BEST Business Center, please visit www.bestbusinesscenter.org.
