Hedstrom Associates

Beth Tener is a sustainability consultant and trainer with over 20 years of experience helping corporations develop their sustainability strategies and implement the organizational changes, capacities, and systems needed to achieve and communicate performance results. She has worked with over 100 companies, many of these in the Fortune 500, in diverse industries such as building materials, chemicals, electric utilities, investment banking, manufacturing, mining, oil, and transportation. Ms. Tener is experienced in training employees to integrate sustainability goals into their work and has a depth of experience in facilitation to enable cross-functional teams to work effectively on design and implementation of sustainability intiatives. She has worked with Gib Hedstrom for over 20 years, at Hedstrom Associates and previously at Arthur D. Little.

Selected examples of her experience include:

• Facilitating strategic planning with management teams to integrate sustainability goals into organizational strategy and develop action plans for implementation. A recent project involved developing a sustainability strategy for a building products manufacturer, including how to expand green product offerings to customers and how to green their internal operations for cost savings and greenhouse gas emission reductions.
• Working over several years with a leading socially responsible investment firm to evolve their research in light of emerging trends and strengthen their internal research processes to ensure consistent analysis of companies. This work also included development of a custom database aligned with their research process, which generated new value-added analysis based on the environmental, social and governance data they collected.
• Working with over 50 companies in a wide range of industries to help them strengthen their environmental management systems to ensure implementation of their environmental strategy and goals. She was worked at the corporate and facility levels, translating corporate expectations into guidance documents and procedures that can be implemented and measured in operations. She has helped numerous companies implement clear roles and responsibilities and establish effective internal procedures, training, reporting, and audit/corrective action programs.
• Conducting benchmarking of leading corporations worldwide who have adopted sustainable development strategies to identify best practices and lessons learned, including DuPont, Nike and Shell. This information was used to develop a model for how companies can gain organizational alignment around sustainable development goals for clients in the cement industry for a project sponsored by the World Business Council on Sustainable Development.
• Helping facilitate a two-day innovation brainstorming session focused on how a multinational manufacturing company could design new products and services to help their customers reduce their environmental impacts and gain business benefits.
• Training hundreds of people in understanding what sustainability means and how to apply these concepts in their organization. For example, she trained representatives from 50 state agencies and colleges as part of the launch of the Massachusetts State Sustainability Program, one of the first state-level programs of its type.

Ms. Tener was a co-founder and the previous Executive Director of Sustainable Step New England, an organization that provided professional training in sustainability principles, based on The Natural Step framework, and coaching in how to translate these principles into practice in business, government, and communities. Her work also included facilitating cross-sector dialogues and networks working to achieve common sustainability goals, for example:

• She facilitated the Boston Green and Healthy Building Network, which enabled about ten non-profits from the environmental and health fields and representatives of the City of Boston to better collaborate their work in promoting green and healthy buildings in Boston.
• She designed and facilitated a dialogue that brought together sustainable business leaders in Massachusetts to engage with government leaders about how government could help their businesses succeed. The ideas generated in the dialogue were used by the US Environmental Protection Agency as it developed its vision of stewardship and sustainability.

Ms. Tener previously spent 9 years at Arthur D. Little (ADL) working with clients on environmental auditing, environmental management systems/ISO 14001, benchmarking corporate practices, and sustainability strategy. For part of her time with ADL, Ms. Tener was based in ADL's Cambridge, UK office where she worked with many European-based multinational companies.

Ms. Tener has a B.A. in Political Science from Bates College and a M.S. in Environmental Technology from Imperial College in London. Ms. Tener has been invited to give speeches on sustainability, corporate social responsibility, and strategic responses to environmental trends for a wide range of audiences including MIT Sloan Business School, National Environmental Partnership Summit, the National Association of Environmental Trainers, and the NESEA Building Energy conference.