The second meetup in our series on Sustainable Enterprise Models was designed in response to questions coming out of the first one, namely:

1. Why are we getting together to create another meetup?
2. What are we going to try to accomplish together?
3. What is the language of sustainable enterprise, and how can we ensure we have a similar frame of reference as we move forward?

We organized the session to allow participants to engage with one another, and not simply be “talked at” by another guru.  This led to a diverse and wide-ranging discussion about what sustainable enterprise is really about, and how we want to engage an authentic and participatory discussion in our community.

We acknowledge that this meta meetup — a networked discussion of how the group will comport itself going forward — is not everyone’s cup of tea.  We hope it’s clear that this session was not representative of what we expect to accomplish, but rather a critical alignment of community viewpoints to allow the meetup to better serve the community of leaders who seek to create more sustainable enterprise in the Front Range of Colorado.

Setting that qualification aside, here are the group’s answers to the three questions poised above:

1. What is the language of sustainable enterprise, and how can we ensure a similar frame of reference as we move forward?

This is a confusing marketplace of ideas and concepts that were each born somewhere else.  Everyone has one foot in this new, emerging space, and another foot firmly planted in some adjacent field.  These adjacent fields include academia, traditional for-profit business, traditional non-profit philanthropy, non-traditional for-profit business (including sectors like cleantech, LOHAS, organic food), corporate social responsibility (CSR), government and potentially other sectors, as well.

Each one of those fields has its own values and lexicon, and while CSR and social entrepreneurism could be mistaken for one another, in fact they are quite different.  In a separate blog post, we will begin to unpack the language of sustainable enterprise and change agency.  In the long run, we’ll contribute to comprehensive maps of the new ecology, but neither of those can be fully captured here.

For now, we are going to say that a sustainable enterprise:

• could be either a for-profit business, a non-profit philanthropy or some other type of hybrid organization
• measures its success in a combination of financial, social and environmental impact
• is thoughtful and aware of the impact that spending habits have on community
• respects the integrity of human rights
• balances collaboration with competition
• balances quality with quantity
• is changing, and learning how to get better at what it does
• may be imperfect, and may not be implementing policies that capture the entire spirit of sustainability

2. What are we going to try to accomplish together?

We want the Front Range of Colorado — defined as the population corridor bounded by Colorado Springs and Fort Collins, and including Denver, Boulder and surrounding communities, which inscribes the majority of the state’s population — to have an increasing percentage of organizations become sustainable enterprise.  Specifically:

• amplify sustainable enterprise practices
• have more new organizations get started with sustainability in their DNA
• connect leaders of these organizations in learning networks
• discuss the challenges of running an organization in a trusted community of peers
• support a community within which we want to raise families and nourish future generations

3. Why are we getting together to create another meetup?

Because no one else is hosting this discussion.  Because we all want to learn and collaborate about building sustainable enterprise.  Because we believe that all enterprises — for-profit as well as non-profit — are a part of a bigger aspect of the human ecology that includes community, society, and human and other life, and that enterprise needs to contribute to that larger cycle, and not simply extract profits from it.  Because we know this is fundamentally a community exercise.

So come join us.  The next event is being hosted in Denver (previous events were in Boulder), timed to coincide with the lunch break at the Angel Capital Summit, which takes place on November 17th, at the Colorado Convention Center.  We will review of the sustainability practices with Jennifer Orgolini, Sustainability Steward for New Belgium Brewing Company, one of Colorado’s highly evolved sustainable enterprises, which produces one of our favorite products, Fat Tire Ale.  In December, we will announce an ongoing schedule of events in Denver and Boulder for 2010.