Lunch and Learn - Shenandoah Landfill
Tuesday - March 14, 2023
Register by March 7th!
Please join us for a VRA Lunch and Learn opportunity!
Sustainability Matters’ flagship initiative reclaims “dead” land by planting native pollinator and wildlife habitat at landfills. Through bringing conservation to the most unexpected place of all - your local dump! - we build community engagement around environmental transformation, inspiring and educating the public to create similar landscapes at home and elsewhere. We’re currently Making Trash Bloom in a cross-section of Virginia counties: rural Rappahannock (pop. 7,000), urban Fairfax (pop. 1.2 million), and the project’s birthplace, agricultural Shenandoah County (pop. 44,000). Our ultimate goal is a model that’s scalable across communities and site conditions, enabling landfills everywhere to bloom.
Sari founded Sustainability Matters in 2018, together with Paula Brownlee and Amanda Scheetz. Building this start-up nonprofit has become Sari’s passion project. She is a refugee from academia, a former business school professor whose research specialty, behavioral finance, focused on explaining why investors don’t behave the way economic theory says they should. The perspective gained from working in the financial industry (where, aged 21, she started her first job as an emerging markets analyst two weeks before an epic Mexican peso devaluation), and from studying the aberrations of individuals and organizations, informs Sari’s understanding of environmental behavior and her approach to running Sustainability Matters. Before settling in the Shenandoah Valley, Sari lived and taught around the world, including in New York City, where she earned her Ph.D. at New York University; Norway, where she first started foraging in the hundreds of acres of forest behind her house; and Israel, where she taught at the Hebrew University and learned to garden. Transitioning to a climate where weeds are more of an issue than lack of water was quite an adjustment.
Info on making trash bloom project here https://www.sustainabilitymatters.earth/community
News article https://www.whsv.com/2022/04/21/making-trash-bloom-valley-nonprofit-plants-pollinator-habitat-landfill/
Youtube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9z1kMd8-Lh0
Cost: $25 VRA members
Copyright (c) 2017 Virginia Recycling Association Virginia Recycling Association is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization.
