Kristen von Hoffmann, Founder of Greenfox Schools
Green Businesses are hotter than ever and even in the worst of economies, Ecopreneurs are looking for ways to get get funded and bring their dreams to fruition. However when it comes to the business of K-12 education, it can be challenging to get the show on the road. It helps of course to have a solid business plan and passion to carry out your mission.
Ecopreneurist recently had the opportunity to interview Kristen von Hoffmann, the president and founder of Greenfox Schools, a consulting company that provides schools with cutting edge environmental technology, products and programs to help them go green. A member of K-12 Sector Team for the U.S. Partnership for Education for Sustainable Development, Kristen bases her company on the Greenfox5, a strategy she developed that defines the five main functional points of optimization for any building as Energy, Waste Disposal, Food, Products, and Greenspace. Passionate about her mission, her is what she had to say to us.
EP: What is Greenfox Schools? When did you begin it? Why?
KVH: Greenfox Schools is a start-up company founded in March 2008, with the aim of helping schools go green. We are currently a team of 8 people. I was inspired to work on Greenfox when I started teaching elementary school, after I finished college in 2006.
As a Yale undergraduate I was part of the then fledgling Yale Sustainable Food Project (YSFP), which has since grown into a thriving model for campus sustainability nationwide.
It was on the farm in the greenhouse, nestled and crouching in the baby lettuce and breathing in the warm, sweet soil smell that I began to wonder how we could bring this to children. At the time, I was tutoring at an inner-city elementary school in New Haven. This combined with my interest in social entrepreneurship, city planning and the environment fueled my passion for starting Greenfox schools.
Excited by the prospect of life after college, I packed up my old Volvo and drove from Montclair, New Jersey, to Cambridge, Massachusetts. I started teaching 4th grade on the North Shore, and simultaneously began working on a business model together with other social entrepreneurs.
I still teach part-time, now at a progressive independent school. In my three years here I’ve built a network of close friends and colleagues who are equally passionate about making the world a better place in their own ways.
Suffice it to say, my first year was not always easy, but I smile when I think about the quiet, padded feeling of afternoons in the faculty copy-room, having just finished a fun, full, and exhausting day of teaching, children’s voices echoing in my head, the smell of warm copy paper; and pressing the start button on the photocopier before embarking on the next phase of my day i.e. starting a business!
The late afternoons and evenings would be filled with refining drafts of the Greenfox5 categories and sharpening the business model. I would contact green business owners to research everything I possibly could from cleaning product manufacturers to local bottle-and-can recycling centers.
I developed a strategy called the Greenfox5, which identifies five categories of environmental optimization for any school: Energy, Waste Disposal, Food, Products, and Greenspace. The Greenfox5 is like a roadmap for change, a holistic approach to making a school sustainable. The Greenfox5 can be applied to homes and businesses too.
What’s nice about the Greenfox5 is that it gives institutions both the full-scale picture of all they can do to make the change as well as a starting point. The process of “going green” can be hugely overwhelming, both for children and adults. Greenfox5 shows you that you only have to start with one of the categories to begin the process of sustainability.
[...] Read an interview with Kristen von Hoffmann as she talks about Greenfox Schools for Ecopreneurist in Reenita Malhotra’s article, “Greenfox Schools: Greening the Obama Generation.” [...]