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members of the Creative Class value meritocracy, diversity and individuality, and look for these characteristics when they relocat

For a city to attract the Creative Class, he argues, it must possess "the three 'T's": Talent (a highly talented/educated/skilled population), Tolerance (a diverse community, which has a 'live and let live' ethos), and Technology (the technological infrastructure necessary to fuel an entrepreneurial culture)

“the Creative Class share of the workforce; innovation, measured as patents per capita; high tech industry, using the Milken Institute's widely accepted Tech Pole Index…; and diversity, measured by the Gay Index, a reasonable proxy for an area’s openness"

Creative workers are looking for cultural, social, and technological climates in which they feel they can best "be themselves".

active participation in a variety of experiential activities.

Street Level Culture

hard to draw the line between participant and observer, or between creativity and its creators”

interest in being participants and not spectators

40 million workers—30 percent of the U.S. workforce

Super-Creative Core: This group comprises about 12 percent of all U.S. jobs. It includes a wide range of occupations (e.g. science, engineering, education, computer programming, research), with arts, design, and media workers forming a small subset. Florida considers those belonging to this group to “fully engage in the creative process” (2002, p. 69). The Super-Creative Core is considered innovative, creating commercial products and consumer goods. The primary job function of its members is to be creative and innovative. “Along with problem solving, their work may entail problem finding”

knowledge-based workers

Florida argues that the Creative Class is socially relevant because of its members' ability to spur regional economic growth through innovation (2002).

these usually require a high degree of formal education

"It's as sound a bet for us today as investing in PC-related technologies in 1981 or in internet-enabling technologies in 1994."

Currently healthcare providers throw 90 percent of that information away.

Like other transactional aspects of sustainability, most notably supply chain issues, getting the incentives right allows for greater transparency, better decision-making, and more “sustainable” sustainability solutions.

NGOs and civil society organizations can develop credible standards, decipher local issues, and create the environment that supports sustainable urban growth.

Business can deploy systems that address real social and environmental challenges — along with the partnership of government and civil society

Government policies can create income distribution, economic and social mobility, the right incentives for the private sector to invest, space for truly engaged discussion, and a commitment to longer-term sustainability strategies.

City-focused initiatives, lead by NGOs and the private sector, are drawing more attention to the clear opportunities, but the results are still lagging behind the pace of the growing challenges. While innovation is important for developing sustainability solutions, technologies and infrastructure systems that will help achieve sustainable growth already exist. Companies that provide infrastructure systems and components for energy, buildings, and transportation, must push fast-forward to deploy these technologies faster. They can start by collectively understanding the challenges and the role that each stakeholder sector can play in support of sustainable growth:

At BSR, we know that when business engages stakeholders proactively, the insights gained will lead to more informed decision-making, more valuable collaboration, and more inspired business models. The challenges are large, but the quiet and unstoppable megatrends are larger. The sooner meaningful engagement is at the forefront of the sustainable urban infrastructure agenda, the sooner we can hit fast-forward and have a chance at truly sustainable growth.

Per capita economic activity increases 10 percent with every 5-percentage-point increase in urban population.

Just like in corporations, setting goals and having a vision proves to be an essential start for cities that want to engage business. The WBCSD Urban Infrastructure Initiative (UII)

“Cities are looking at sustainability as their strategy,”

The global infrastructure and technology firm Siemens also entered the fray with its Green City Index, which ranks more than 120 global cities on a variety of environmental dimensions. Cities at the bottom have the greatest opportunities, and the ones at the top have the most lessons to offer

“I talk to cities about their strategy and goals just like I would with a company. City CSOs are making the same decisions as companies and have very similar challenges with internal engagement.

Matthew Lynch, the project lead, said one of the main success factors is the opportunity for direct and open dialogue. “The companies in the UII are engaging collaboratively with cities upstream in the planning process, demonstrating the value of the early involvement of business and showing how a multisector group of leading companies can help cities find integrated solutions to interconnected challenges,”

encourage the idea that it was business, not just individual companies working with cities.

The WBCSD expects that companies will use the landscape reports to refine their own approaches to working with these cities, targeting specific challenges and opportunities.

Kate Brass, GE Energy’s ecomagination program manager, said there’s a “need for better coordination and understanding among governments, industries, and NGOs so that cities holistically plan for and build the infrastructure of tomorrow rather than create an infrastructure of mismatched components and potentially stranded assets."

But if we see bill reductions when we change our behaviors and make improvements, the more we believe we can act to reduce our bills, and the more likely we are to do more.

In order to combat learned helplessness and shift the perceived locus of control for energy, we believe that a systemic disruption is needed.

We’ve got to shift the perceived locus of control by creating bill reduction “wins” for consumers before we’ll see real, lasting, behavior change.

“30 under 30” in energy by Forbes.

Their company started slowly, garnering interest-free investments from individuals to fund solar installations on five community projects. They range from homes on a Navajo reservation in Arizona to the Asian Resource Center in Oakland. All are smallish installations

I invested $100 in the Asian Resource Center installation in 2011, in equal parts to support the fledgling company as well as a social-service organization in my hometown

Those first projects were funded using a zero-interest investment model similar to Kiva, where investors get their principal back over time but no interest. This allowed Mosaic to avoid federal regulation and to go to market, learn the business, get feedback, and show traction for the idea. At the same time, it launched into the process of registering with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the federal agency that governs investment firms.

More recently, the company started raising money for projects in which it would pay interest. It can do this while waiting for SEC approval thanks to something called Regulation D, which exempts from regulatory oversight the offer and sale of up to $1 million of securities in a 12-month period.

A small group of investors was invited to put in as little as $25 and have been promised a return of 6.38 percent over five years.

The project is projected to save the youth center more than $160,000 through reduced electricity costs.

I invested $200 in this project as part of Mosaic’s private “beta” investment round

“As an asset class, the default rates on solar leases and power purchase agreements are extremely low,”

If I want, I can reinvest the earned interest and repaid principal in other Mosaic projects with the click of a button.

nlike investing in CDs, there are risks in Mosaic’s projects. The solar-installation customer could default on its monthly payments. The solar anels or installation could be faulty, tying the project up with repairs, negotiations, or worse.

There are a lot of unknowns: the number of people willing to invest sums, small or large, in energy projects offered by a start-up with a very short track record; the cost of attracting and servicing these investors; the number of available investment-quality energy projects; the actual performance of those projects during the life of the investments;

Together with a $2 million grant from the Department of Energy

All told, 51 investors ponied up $40,000 for the 106-panel installation; the whole project got funded in just six days. I’ve already received my first interest payment.

It’s a bold idea: Raise money from the masses in order to bring solar to the masses, providing value to everyone along the way.

Having proved the concept, Parish and Rosen are now ready to kick things into high gear, throwing open the doors to all qualified investors.

“The economics of solar have begun to make sense in more places, and online investing and peer-to-peer finance are becoming widespread. Those are the two big forces that we’re a part of.”

I asked him why no one had done this before. “It’s a really difficult set of skills and competencies that you need to pull together on one team to make this business model work,” he explained. “You need the securities law expertise. You need the solar project finance expertise. You need the technology expertise to build the online investment platform, and you need the marketing expertise to get people to invest in the projects.”

For each project, Mosaic provides the underwriting and due diligence. “If we like it and it meets our investment committee’s criteria, we make a loan offer to the project developer or the project owner, and negotiate a loan to them.” Mosaic takes a servicing fee (the difference between the interest rate charged the developer and the rate pays investors) and an origination fee of between 3 and 5 percent of the loan, which the developer pays. Mosaic doesn’t do the installation itself — it contracts that out.

Clearly, not yet a pathway to riches. What’s needed is volume.

“Our goal is to be doing billions of dollars of investments a year in clean-energy projects,

“We have already had a lot of developers coming to us," he says. "We’re interested in offering high-quality, clean-energy projects for people to invest in.

We believe clean energy is good in and of itself and is a great asset class for investment. So we’re looking at all kinds of projects.”

It’s not just solar. Parish and Rosen are looking at a broader category of projects to finance — what they call clean-energy infrastructure. That includes other forms energy as well as energy-efficiency projects and electric-vehicle infrastructure.

, the company aims to scale its offerings, including geographically, to get millions of Americans involved with funding clean-energy projects.

However it plays out, it’s a compelling and potentially disruptive business model. Allowing smaller investors to participate in clean-energy investments is an exciting possibility. And the relatively predictable returns of solar

can make these investments a safer bet than many traditional Wall Street investment vehicles.

And not for just small guys. Imagine if larger mission-driven investors, including pension funds and university endowments, started pouring money into Mosaic. The expanding investment pools could rapidly accelerate the growth of renewable energy and efficiency projects in the marketplace.

“I think a lot of people are just excited about the model,” says Parish, “and have been wanting to find a place that they can feel good about investing, that they can also generate pretty good yield from. And that’s what we’re trying to do.”

Parish makes a point: Some of this is an exercise in feel-good investing. But that’s nontrivial: How many of your investments do you feel good about? Even some of the so-called socially responsible funds hold stocks of fossil-fuel companies and other corporate nasties in their portfolios. If the nascent trend of disinvestment in fossil-fuel companies takes off among climate-minded investors, where will they next put their money? If Parish and Rosen have their way, there will be a new generation of cleaner investment alternatives to be found — perhaps, like me, right in your own community.

other local crowdfunding platforms, such as Lucky Ant

Our focus is really building a local ecosystem for finance

Structurally the platforms all look similar, the mechanics are often very similar, but our focus is really our mission

At its core the local movement is going to get a lot stronger