Simple Living with Wanda Urbanska

Wanda's Diary Entries

Wednesday, October 19, 2005

Last night Bob Wells and I had the chance to spend time with some of our favorite people and partners: the good folks at Catawba College’s Center for the Environment in Salisbury, NC. Dr. John E. Wear, Jr., Willa Mays, Fred and Alice Stanback. It’s about a 90-minute drive each way from Mount Airy, but what a wonderful resource the Catawba Center is to the region and state. The Center which houses classrooms, office space, and meeting rooms, is a green building that overlooks at 189-acre nature preserve. Since our television series and Catawba formed a partnership last year, I’ve been over there about a half dozen times, to attend programs and celebrations, etc.

Last night, Alisa Gravtiz, executive director of Coop America, was the featured speaker. Alisa is spearheading a nationwide movement to encourage socially responsible spending and investing on the part of the public. “Every time you spend a dollar, it goes to work in the world.” Alisa challenged us to decide—when we spend those dollars—whether we want “to contribute to the problem or the solution.” She said that “economic activism is being intentional with your dollars.” I love Alisa’s ebullient style and her natural optimism. It was fascinating, too, to hear her background as a “girl next door” who grew up in Minnesota with a social worker father and nurse-mother. “They were always talking social justice issues at the dinner table,” she said. Service is just a natural extension of Alisa background and upbringing. As a junior high school student, she was inspired by the first Earth Day back in 1970 to read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. After attending Brandeis University in Boston and getting her MBA from Harvard University, she now has a 22-year career at Coop America. That organization is doing major work to transform the world—to become part of the solution. I am sure the entire audience left inspired—as we did—to become part of the solution.