Urban Green Lab Inc.

Our Sustainable Classrooms division includes regular teacher professional development for schools and districts, personalized cohort trainings, access to standards-aligned sustainable living curricula, and year-round guidance. The Division also includes our own Sustainable Classrooms Curriculum, created in partnership with Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College of Education, and a digital app for students to investigate their own household waste prevention opportunities with their families. Classrooms is a crossroads of project-based learning, social emotional learning, civic leadership, and the four “Cs” of STEAM education.

Urban Green Lab also partners with the U.S. Green Building Council to certify teachers as Green Classrooms Professionals, helping advance their careers, credibility, and confidence.

Our Sustainable Households division works closely with nonprofit organizations, neighborhood associations, property managers and volunteer HOAs, music venues, and sports leagues, and includes personalized team trainings, access to sustainable living curricula and tools, and connection to resources that help solve your sustainable living challenges. The Division also hosts the Nonprofit Sustainability Roundtable for Nashville, in partnership with the Center for Nonprofit Management, uniting professionals from organizations large and small to exchange best practices, tour member nonprofits, and advocate collectively.

Our Sustainable Workplaces division includes personalized team trainings, access to sustainable workplace curricula and tools, and introduction to community resources that help you better solve your business’s sustainability challenges. The Division hosts the Corporate Sustainability Roundtable for Nashville, uniting professionals from some 40 companies large and small (Nissan, Kroger, Country Music Television, etc.) to exchange best practices, tour member companies, and advocate collectively, as well as Workforce Discoveries which embeds highschool seniors from the MNPS Academies of Nashville program into company teams.

In 2020, Urban Green Lab adopted a new five-year strategic plan to guide the organization's future growth. The 2025 Plan's goals are:

1. AWARENESS - To increase visibility in the community
2. DIVERSITY - To better respond to the needs of diverse communities
3. MESSAGING - To more clearly communicate our mission and impact
4. COMPETITION - To understand the field in order to catalyze change
5. TECHNOLOGY & INNOVATION - To utilize technology to be innovative and efficient
6. STABILITY & EXPANSION - To strengthen our business model to drive growth

For the first time in the organization's history, Urban Green Lab is working from the organizational (vs. programmatic) level utilizing a three-part rubric: Organize, Train and Connect. Our three divisions have longitudinal goals which intersect each of these, creating an interwoven theory of change that embeds all of our programs with an iterative prototyping model, missional deliverables, strategic plans per program, evaluation tactics, and outcomes reporting methods.

We are operating with cross-cutting organizational tasks within each strategic goal:

A. Engage strategically with our diverse and multicultural community
B. Use data to measure and improve outcomes.
C. Know and grow our audience.
D. Use technology to elevate program and operational outcomes.

Our divisional leadership in Sustainable Classrooms, Sustainable Households, and Sustainable Workplaces lead each divisional project or program in coordination with our strategic goals and tasks. Individual programs such as the Nashville Food Waste Initiative are deployed with specificity, in order that the entire agency can manage against our expectations and desired outcomes. Programs now have the support of the full team, utilizing a triumvirate of highly skilled and trained sustainability professionals to design, deploy and debrief on all activities to ensure our work is moving forward, mission aligned and serving our community with measurable results.

Urban Green Lab has successfully moved our operations from an innovative, yet limited, Mobile Laboratory which was housing the majority of our programs. Between 2016 and 2020, the organization has reformed the programming in Classrooms, Households and Workplaces divisions which are led by highly skilled sustainability professionals. With steering committees and roundtables, each division embraces and exemplifies community by serving as a convener, educator and thought leader. Our Sustainable Classrooms training provides professional development for Metro Nashville Public School teachers and private/homeschool educators to enable them to bring sustainability into the classroom for nearly every grade and subject using a standards-aligned curriculum design in partnership with Vanderbilt University. Our Workplaces and Households divisions have grown their roundtable memberships to the point we are now dividing them up by sector (i.e.: construction, hospitality, etc.) for deeper learning. Finally, our organization has been tapped to lead a the Nashville Food Waste Initiative, a national initiative in partnership with the National Resource Defense Council. Our agency has been forward thinking and is seizing the current moment to launch a program focused on environmental justice, to educate stakeholders in neighborhood development how they can support racial justice through equitable decision making in determining commercial (re)development needs in diverse, yet underserved neighborhoods.