Joanne Pasternack is a Hall of Fame-level connector, an expert at bringing athletes, teams, brands and causes together for good. Her work with the San Francisco 49ers, Golden State Warriors and now Oliver+Rose, her sports philanthropy agency, has resulted in programs that deliver tangible benefits to a myriad of communities. She recently launched Athletes Voices, a program that “empowers elite athletes with personalized playbooks to amplify their voices for change.” In our Earth Week edition of GreenSportsPod, we discuss how: Pasternack’s father inspired her passion for the environment Sports philanthropy was in her blood since childhood Athletes can become […]

Environmental justice, the disproportionate exposure of communities of color and the poor to the harmful impacts of pollution, had not gotten much oxygen in the sports world, until a groundbreaking panel discussion on the topic at the 2019 Green Sports Alliance Summit in Philadelphia. Kunal Merchant, an expert on environmental justice and the head of Lotus Advisory, a consulting firm that helps clients — including sports teams and venues — pursue transformative change, moderated. Today, we pick up this very important conversation with Kunal in Episode 9 of GreenSportsPod. He pushes the sports industry — and the Green-Sports niche within […]

Welcome to GreenSportsPod, the new occasional podcast series from GreenSportsBlog. Our guest for Episode 4 is Milos Ribic, director of Adidas Ventures, the athletic apparel maker’s venture capital arm. His job is to identify investment-worthy startups that will help fuel the company’s success over the next 5 to 30 years. It was Ribic’ and Adidas’ focus on two sectors — sustainable materials and new sports media — that drew GreenSportsPod’s interest. We hope you enjoy the interview as much as we enjoyed conducting it.         Let us know what you think about the pod via GreenSportsBlog’s comment section and/or the […]

Wednesday’s Earth Week at 50 series opener looked back to the beginnings of Earth Day — and the sports connections to it — in our interview with Tia Nelson, daughter of Earth Day founder, Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin. In today’s installment, we shift our gaze forward with our GreenSportsPod interview with Melissa Kalicin, founder of Oceanum Vela, a startup that saves soon-to-be-discarded sails from elite racing boats (think Ocean Race or America’s Cup) from the landfill and upcycles them into duffels, handbags and much more. The Oceanum Vela story is but one example of a dynamic Green-Sports startup ecosystem that […]

Welcome to GreenSportsPod, the new occasional podcast series from GreenSportsBlog. Is now the right time to launch a podcast about the intersection of Green and Sports, with the world in the midst of the harrowing outbreak of COVID-19? Who really knows but here’s why we answered yes: COVID-19-related news will — and should — be the first (and second and third and…) thing people seek out for the foreseeable future. Yet we also know that many if not most folks will have some bandwidth for other content. And we know that climate change is not waiting for the coronavirus crisis to […]