To the editor:

It is Red Envelope Season here on Bainbridge Island and my husband John Cunningham and I will continue our longstanding ritual of sitting down at our dining room table to decide which organizations will receive the amount we set aside for the annual One Call for All Campaign. There are so many to choose from.

So I’m writing to introduce a new kid on the block. The Emerge Leadership Project is an environmental nonprofit devoted to accelerating our progress towards sustainability in the built environment by providing leadership development training (including an annual weekend residency at IslandWood), mentoring, publications, and other resources to professionals and advocates in the sustainable building community. This is the first time it’s listed on OCFA and our intention is to use any contributions to build a scholarship fund for workshop attendees from the nonprofit and public sector as well as to conduct community outreach.

Old constructs of leadership do not work anymore, and EMERGE seeks to make everyone working in the Sustainable Community a leader. The urgency presented by our environmental, social, and economic conditions expressed eloquently recently by Pope Francis in his Encyclical “On Care for our Common Home” demands a change in the way we approach solving these conditions.

If we are going to address environmental issues in a timely and just manner, we urgently need lots of leaders working effectively and collaboratively at multiple points in our community. One Call for All funds will provide partial scholarships to emergent leaders from within the Bainbridge Island community to participate in the annual EMERGE Leadership workshop at IslandWood, creating opportunities to become more effective advocates for sustainability on the island, whether its igniting new initiatives or strengthening existing ones. They will gain practical knowledge, become part of a support community, and be eligible for mentoring and personal leadership planning as they take the workshop experience into their professional and personal networks.

The scholarships will encourage participation from employees of island nonprofits as well as employees working for the city. Individuals in similar roles from other communities have taken the workshop and have been very successful creating and achieving leadership goals whether their work was in greening affordable housing, promoting renewable energy, facilitating a city green building team or advocating for new policies.

But with stretched budgets, professional development falls to the wayside. Although we have had nearly a dozen BI-based participants in our workshop, none of these were from the city or local housing or environmental advocacy groups.

So, when you sit down to review the list of wonderful charities listed in the OCFA brochure, or better yet, listed on the OCFA directory online, please consider including EMERGE Leadership Project (look under “E”) with the non-profits you decide to support this year. We will appreciate it, and so will the planet.

KATHLEEN O’BRIEN (CUNNINGHAM)

Bainbridge Island