Landmark Forum Graduate Project: Bringing Green Groups Together

people who knew Ariane Delafosse before she took the Landmark Forum last year would tell you that she would be the last person to do any kind of community project. “I was a complete introvert,” she recalls. “I had no interest in my community at all.”

In the Landmark Advanced Course, she decided that she wanted to live a life of generosity, compassion, and inspiration. However, she had no idea how to make this real in the world, though she knew she wanted to impact the environment in her home state of New Jersey.

holding_globe.jpgShe woke up one morning and the words ‘Community Green’ were stuck in her head. She excitedly checked to see if that name was taken as a website, and found communitygreen.org was not taken. She was starting the Self-Expression and Leadership program, and she decided that her project in that program would be to bring different elements of the environmental movement together. She launched Community Green on Easter of last year.

In a move completely uncharacteristic of who she had been in the past, Delafosse spent last summer going to every environmental meeting and introducing herself to every environmental group she could find. What she found was that there were a host of small environmental groups out there doing different things, mostly unware of what each other were doing.

img_5901.jpg“The vegetarians were disconnected from the clean energy folk, who were disconnected from the farm people,” she said. “One of the most rewarding things about Community Green is to see people network, watching them get more powerful as they work together.” The organization serves as a clearinghouse for every kind of environmental group and project under the sun, having more people get involved, having the different groups work together, and having Community Green volunteers providing manpower to all these disparate projects.  Delafosse sums it up this way: “I knew that if I coordinated and connected those efforts under the umbrella of one organization, there was much more that could be done to raise awareness and carry that upward through local communities and even state government. ”

Delafosse herself works in the kitchen industry and she personally created a green kitchen project for designers, builders, architects and homeowners which inspired over 50 guests to look at what’s new in green kitchen design.

shapeimage_3.jpgMost transparent.gifPart of the way Delafosse and Community Green bring people together to work on these projects is through meetups, public meetings arranged through the popular meetup.com website, which have been so successful that meetup.com just honored Delafosse as the national “Meetup Organizer of the Week” for January 21-28.

Through it all, Delafosse remains passionately committed to the idea of the transformation of each individual. She knows from personal experience that until each of us realizes what we want to accomplish and what we are capable of, we will be nowhere close to fulfilling on what’s possible in the world.

Check out Community Green or contact Delafosse at [email protected].

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