Nik Blosser, President of Celilo Group Media (publisher of Chinook Book) was one of three featured presenters at the 20th Annual BEST Awards on April 25, 2012. The BEST Awards is an annual awards ceremony honoring the region’s most sustainable businesses. For those of you who couldn’t attend the event, following is Nik’s speech in its entirety. Enjoy!
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Remarks at the Portland BEST Awards
Nines Hotel Ballroom, Portland, Oregon
April 25, 2012
By Nik Blosser
President, Celilo Group Media
Good afternoon, everyone. It's really wonderful to see so many friends and colleagues here today. Many of us have been working together on sustainability for over a decade. So in thinking about what I might say to you all this afternoon, I figured I would just tell you all how I'm feeling now, after many years working on sustainability, what I think we've accomplished and what I think we haven't. I know this is an awards ceremony. And I feel the best way that I can honor everyone is to just speak from the heart and tell it to you straight as I see things.
We have built what many people, and certainly the media, call the most sustainable city in the country. In the Chinook Book business we've been fortunate over the past few years to expand to several other metro areas, including Seattle, Denver and the Bay Area. And I travel to these other cities that we in Portland consider our competition. What's been truly unique and stood out to me about our region over the past twenty years is that we have had consistently strong private sector leadership on sustainability.
Our business leaders worked together and even formed associations and certifiers to support sustainable business. Groups like the Food Alliance and Salmon Safe and EPEAT for electronics and more recently the Green Sports Alliance, and many more, are doing amazing things nationally for sustainability, and they're based here. The public sector has been supportive and involved, but not in charge. That's not how it has been in other cities. Our first green building was built by the private sector. That's not the case almost anywhere else. In other jurisdictions, like Chicago or New York, if you have a strong elected official with a lot of power, they can do a lot. In the Portland region, we don't give any one individual elected official much power. Through the structure of our governments, power is spread out among many entities – from Tri-Met and the City and County to Metro and different school districts. This isn't always bad.
This combination of private sector leadership and supportive but dispersed public sector power allowed sustainability to flourish here in certain ways. In the past two decades, where we've really excelled, it's been where we've focused on growing individual sustainable industries, including clean energy, green building and natural foods. This seemed like the right place to focus – it focused on the economic side of things, it reflected the interest and financial alignment of the private sector, we have a great built-in consumer base for new green businesses to sell their products. And focusing on the economic side builds a base of power and influence that we in the sustainability movement can then use to do other important, difficult things. All of your success, demonstrated in part by this event, and the Business Journal's success with Sustainable Business Oregon, indicate this influence has grown substantially.
So my message to you all today is that the day has come to use the power we've amassed, and bring it to bear on things we have neglected.
When I look around our region now, and think about sustainability, what am I thinking about most? I'm actually thinking about our school system. And I'm thinking about our corrections system. The class sizes in Portland Public Schools and our high school graduation rates are completely unacceptable. In the U.S. -- and Oregon's no different -- we incarcerate a higher percentage of our population than basically any other 1st world country, and the people in prison are disproportionately people of color. Not only is this morally wrong, it's ridiculous from a fiscal perspective.
We are world leaders in green buildings, transit and clean energy. But we're laggards in educating our citizens, and in our corrections system.
Because of the way we as citizens have set up our government in this region, with power dispersed, we in the private sector can't just sit back and expect our elected officials to fix things on their own. The government couldn't have accomplished what's been achieved over the past 20 years in sustainable industries without all of us. And they cannot solve these other problems without our involvement either.
Make no mistake: I want you all to win a BEST Award. I want you all to look inside your businesses and find ways to achieve amazing results in energy conservation, water conservation, toxics reduction. And going forward, I'd also like you to demand that community-wide goals, goals that often reflect more of the social side of sustainability, get greater priority.
I'll end with a true story: On one of the beautiful, midwinter spring days we had a couple months ago, I took my kids to the frozen yogurt shop at the corner of Bybee and Milwaukie in SE Portland. It was packed. We all got way too much yogurt and toppings, and we sat outside and ate and watched the world. It was such a great day, and such a great, busy corner, that a kid, about eleven years old, set up on the corner and started playing his trumpet. He put his trumpet case down in front of him, opened it up, and he just played. People with their families walked by, chatting, carrying their bike helmets and skateboards, licking cones, smiling, walking to the other shops, passing by in front of the trumpet player.
We were there about 20 minutes watching the scene. Dozens had walked by. Nobody, including me, put money in the kid's trumpet case, which made me feel a little bit sad for the kid but I didn't think too much about it. Then I saw, at the street corner, a shopping cart, about half full of cans and bottles with a thick dirty blanket on top, pushing down the sidewalk in front of us, toward the trumpet player. It was pushed by a haggard-looking old guy, with long dirty blond hair and ripped clothes. He was hunched over pushing his cart, slowly, down the busy sidewalk. As he got to the trumpet player, the guy stopped. Now this kid, the trumpeter, I know will go far, because he didn't miss a beat. He just kept playing. And the old homeless guy – I assume he was homeless - reached down deep into his pocket. He pulled out his hand, looked down at it and saw about six coins. The boy was still playing, and the guy dumped the entire handful of coins into the trumpet case, nodded his head at the boy, and starting pushing the cart again down the street.
Now, this guy's recycling. And this guy's supporting kids playing music. Portland Public Schools announced ten days ago they were laying off another 100 teachers, including many music teachers.
So my hope is that in our own lives, while we're doing our own equivalent of recycling bottles and cans, we also stop to honor and support the trumpet player.
Thank you.
May 18, 2012 
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