About Us

The No Impact Project is an international, environmental, nonprofit project, founded  in the spring of 2009. It was inspired by the No Impact Man book, film, and blog.

Mission

To empower citizens to make choices which better their lives and lower their environmental impact through lifestyle change, community action, and participation in environmental politics.

The No Impact Project was conceived by Colin Beavan, aka No Impact Man, following the success of his blog, book, and film, which chronicle his family’s year-long experiment living a zero-waste lifestyle in New York City. Central to his thesis is the notion that deep-seated individual behavior change leads to both cultural change and political engagement. Living low-impact provides a clear entry point into the environmental movement. This thesis is the bedrock of the No Impact Project.

Goals

Our Team

Staff

 

Leah Mayor

Leah Mayor, Ph.D. is our No Impact Week Workshop Facilitator. An educator and educational designer for sustainability initiatives in K-12 schools, Leah specializes in leadership and team development through project-based learning. She received her doctorate from Cornell University in Adult Education and Anthropology focusing on transformative learning theory and study abroad. She has worked extensively internationally and nationally on sustainable community initiatives in Nepal, Tibet, Mongolia, and Indonesia and currently runs a national educational leadership training on sustainability. She is passionate about the role of teaching and learning in social change.

Chris Allan

Chris Allan is a consultant on international environmental and development programming and fundraising. He has twenty five years experience in community development and environmental protection with the Environmental Health Fund, Global Greengrants Fund, Catholic Relief Services and the US Peace Corps. Ten of those years were in East and Southern Africa, and the remainder in the United States. He has a Masters Degree in Social Change and Development from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC, and a Bachelors Degree in Biology and African Studies from Wesleyan University in Connecticut.

 

Cari Ladd

Cari Ladd, M.Ed., is our curriculum writer.  She specializes in developing curricula that taps the strengths of media to engage students in meaningful learning experiences. She has produced educator materials for Bill Moyers, P.O.V., FRONTLINE, FRONTLINE/World, and others. Previously, she served as PBS Interactive’s Director of Education, overseeing the development of curricular resources tied to PBS programs, the PBS TeacherSource Web site (now PBS Teachers), and online teacher professional development services. She has also taught in Maryland and Northern Virginia.

 

Colin Beavan

Colin is a former communications consultant for nonprofits turned book writer, blogger, and activist. In 2006, his No Impact Man experiment exploded in the media after being featured in the New York Times, and he has since come to be considered one of the spokespeople for the environmental movement. He writes and administers the provocative environmental blog noimpactman.typepad.com, which has become a meeting point for discussion of environmental issues from a “deep green” perspective. He is an advisor to NYU’s Sustainability Task Force, board member of Transportation Alternatives and advisor to Just Food. He was named one of MSN’s Ten Most Influential Men of 2007, one of Elle Magazine’s 2008 Eco-Illuminators, and his blog was named one of the world’s top 15 environmental websites by Time Magazine.

 

Lilly Belanger

Lilly Belanger is the Program Director for the No Impact Project. She coordinates the No Impact Week Experience with universities, businesses, communities and media organizations and works with No Impact volunteers to plan international days of giving back and other No Impact events and activities. Lilly has experience in awareness raising and fundraising for various non-profits such as Oxfam America and Invisible Children. Through her experiences studying food culture and globalization in Southern Mexico, public health in Cuenca, Ecuador and her first-hand experiences with Mountain Top Removal in her home state of Kentucky, Lilly has developed a varied and passionate view on environmental justice and human well-being. Lilly has a bachelor’s degree from Berea College in the field of Social Justice with a concentration in Sustainability and Environmental Studies.        

Advisors

 

Working Films

Working Films leverages the power of storytelling through documentary film to advance struggles for social, economic, and environmental justice, human and civil rights.

Gillian Caldwell

Gillian Caldwell is the Campaign Director for 1Sky, a new non-partisan national campaign campaign for strong federal action to tackle global climate change and invest in building the clean energy economy of the future. Gillian is also a film maker and an attorney with thirty years of experience advocating for social justice in the United States and around the world.

Graham Hill

Graham Hill is the founder of the sustainability website TreeHugger.com.  He currently focuses on building TreeHugger, managing his ceramic greek cup business, and developing sustainable prototypes.  Graham’s goal is to help push sustainability into the mainstream.

Tim Kasser

Professor Tim Kasser is the Chair of Psychology at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. He has recently been investigating how materialism and values relate to well-being in various nations around the world, as well as what leads some people to become especially focused on different types of values.

Richard Wise

Richard Wise has spent 16 years as a cultural anthropologist at Agent 16, an independent advertising agency. Agent16 is known for non-traditional marketing, combining cultural insights with leveragable brand assets which leads to “culture branding”.      

Volunteer Contributors

Thanks to all of our amazing volunteers:

Allyza Lustig
Christopher Schell
Camen Gupta
Casey O’Malley
Dan Lane
Dani Moore
Dave Gardner
Gail Denemark
Janice Binder
Jennifer Page
Jenny Nelson
Julie Kelly
Karen Moser-Booth
Katherine Bracken
Katie Schooling
Lisa Bellomy
Lowell Brown

Monique Tilford
Nina Carduner
Sara Kablack
Stephanie Patterson
Tanya Seaman
Steven Rasovsky
Maggie Craig
Jessica Brink
Alicia Mountain
Priti Ambani

Partner Organizations

Social engagement campaign partners:

 

Slow Food USA

Slow Food USA seeks to create dramatic and lasting change in the food system.  We reconnect Americans with the people, traditions, plants, animals, fertile soils and waters that produce our food.  We inspire a transformation in food policy, production practices and market forces so that they ensure equity, sustainability and pleasure in the food we eat. For more slowfoodusa.org.

 

Sierra Club

The Sierra Club works to explore, enjoy, and protect wild places, practice and promote the responsible use of the earth’s ecosystems and resources, and educate and enlist humanity to protect and restore the quality of the natural and human environment. For more sierraclub.org.

 

 

What’s Your Tree

What’s your tree is building an international movement of people who are meaningfully engaged in social change projects. Through a series of small group meetings, individuals create a life with purpose and meet people who share their vision of a healthy, peaceful, and sustainable future. For more whatsyourtree.org.

 

Center for a New American Dream

New American Dream helps Americans consume responsibly to protect the environment, enhance quality of life, and promote social justice.  For more newdream.org.

 

1Sky

1Sky is a highly collaborative national campaign building a society-wide movement in support of bold federal action this year to tackle global warming. For more 1sky.org.

  

 

Contact Us

Funding and Program Inquiries

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Media

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Mail

No Impact Project

c/o Sustainable Markets Foundation

Att: Jay R. Halfon

45 W 36th St, 6th Floor

New York, NY 10018