Leading Local Sustainability: Exploring the Connection Between Leaders and Followers

• In Event: Sustainability: Leading Locally for Global Impact

Short Description

Local sustainability in Unity, Maine arose through local leadership towards common sustainable goals. The presenter will share the major factors — including geographic, cultural, and social bonds between the residents and the hardiness of its population — that allowed Unity to move towards a more sustainable community that resulted in personal and societal resilience.

Detailed Abstract

This research is a part of a larger group that will be examining several of the reasons behind the successfulness of Unity’s sustainability initiatives, including the ones that will be focused on in this section. The residents in the town of Unity have an understanding of sustainability and want to become more environmentally friendly in all of their daily tasks, from their work, to the places where they purchase goods and services, and within their own homes. Because Unity is a small town, it is much easier to for leadership to encourage others to work towards a sustainable future within its boundaries.
Leadership is about promoting and influencing change towards a common goal and it is something that everyone can do through the ideals of the courageous follower (Chaleff, 2009), where followers help the leader lead. Leadership is a mechanism by which a group and the individuals in the group grow to better help the system; most importantly, leadership is about the followers, not the leader since without followers there is no role for the leader.
As of the 2010 census, Unity has a population of just 2099 residents, including the students at Unity College. This small size means that the residents have much stronger social bonds or bonding ties, which are the relationships between family members and neighbors, that allow for positive change to spread throughout the community (Newman and Dale, 2005). Leaders within the community have realized this and have tried to promote activities to encourage residents to become more sustainable in their everyday lives. These activities include air sealing within people’s homes to reduce fuel usage, proposals for a large solar array to power the businesses in Unity, and the restoration of old buildings instead of tearing them down. Each of these were proposed by local leaders and organizations and these, as well as other local events and practices that have helped residents be successful in accomplishing their goals.
In addition to social bonds, the residents of Unity have decided to stay in Unity because they enjoy the lifestyle. The Unity lifestyle accepts and promotes the ideals of sustainability in all aspects, social, environmental, and economic. In Unity, residents are encouraged to use the many trails that Unity College develops and maintains, just as they are encouraged to use the Field of Dreams, which is another area that Unity College maintains as a way to give back to the community. Furthermore, Unity College leads the community towards sustainability through the examples on campus, mainly the TerraHaus, the first passive house residence hall in the United States. The Unity lifestyle also affects the businesses within the town; every business in the Unity Business Exchange has worked to become more sustainable, which is one of the key factors towards innovation (Nidumolu, Prahalad, and Rangaswami, 2009). By leading through example, the leaders in the town hope to encourage others to live with a sustainable mindset.
Resilience, or how well a community functions and responds to negative influences, is a key component to life in Maine (Walker, Holling, Carpenter, and Kinzig, 2004). The more modest lifestyle in Unity helped the residents to move towards accepting that negative change is going to happen and allows them to prepare for the next change, including natural disasters, such as intense snow storms, and economic disasters, such as another recession. For example, several homes in the Unity area are off the grid and run solely through wind and solar energy, making them more resilient to infrastructure damage. By creating a more resilient community, Unity naturally leans towards becoming sustainable and the local leadership is influencing people to move towards sustainable goals.

Participant

• Steven Lin, Unity College