The Long-Term Sustainability Network is an organization devoted to making connections between and offering services to people and organizations that are committed to becoming more environmentally and socially sustainable over the long-term. We also provide resources to support entrepreneurs interested in starting environmentally and socially sustainable organizations. While we favor worker-owned co-ops as a model for such organizations, our mission is to support any organization become more sustainable over time.
The Long-Term Sustainability Network has three major missions:
- To consult with individual members, member organizations, and other people and organizations to develop more sustainable practices over time, and distribute widely knowledge of how to be more sustainable.
- To build relationships between individual members and member organizations around sustainable goods and services which allow both individual members and member organizations to benefit from savings obtainable through economies of scale.
- To provide entrepreneurship support for people interested in creating sustainable organizations, including but not limited to worker-owned co-ops.
Philosophy:
We recognize that some people and some organizations are devoted to being socially or environmentally sustainable. And a few are successful at being both. However, it is our experience that most people are too busy with work and family to spend a lot of time figuring out how to live more sustainably, and most organizations are too busy simply trying to survive and meet their mission or purpose. Therefore, the LTSN is structured as a resource for its members:
- To provide easy, doable steps that members can take to slowly become more sustainable over time. Becoming sustainable is a process, not a magical transformation.
- To provide sustainable goods and services so that individuals and organizations can afford to be more sustainable by taking advantage of economies of scale.
- To develop and distribute knowledge, both learning from others and discovering through research how to become more sustainable. From our work so far we have not found evidence that anybody knows what a truly socially and environmentally sustainable society would look like, so let’s figure it out together.
By adopting this structure, we hope to make it easier to be sustainable, and thus make sustainability more accessible to everybody.