Q. In what category do you place Metropolitan Group? Is it a PR Agency, a social change agency, both?

Metropolitan Group is foremost a social change organization. We focus on four core areas with our client organizations - we handle strategic communications, resource development, intercultural communications and organizational development.

We work exclusively on behalf of social purpose organizations—nonprofits/NGOs, government agencies and socially responsible businesses. We team up with our clients to create results such as sustainable attitudinal and behavioral change. We have developed a Public Will Framework. This organizes social impact campaigns in such a way as to have long-term and movement-building impact. Public will building links issues to existing, closely-held values and helps to integrate grassroots outreach with traditional media.

Q: Metropolitan Group’s website states, "Metropolitan Group crafts strategic and creative services that empower social purpose organizations to build a just and sustainable world.” It sounds like an interesting but challenging mission. How did the agency come to do this kind of work?

Eighteen years ago – nineteen this coming February – a group of friends who had graduated from Willamette University got together. They had all gotten corporate jobs after graduation, but they were unhappy with the work they were doing because they wanted to do something that involved social change. They quit their jobs and started the Metropolitan Group.

Q: What relationship do you see between sustainability and social purposes? Are there times when they conflict with one another?

A lot of people think that there has to be a conflict between sustainability and social purposes. We feel that sustainability is a core issue of all the work we do. For example, if we are working to bring good schools and health care access to children, we do ourselves a disservice if these same children do not have clean drinking water and air to breathe. There does not always have to be a tradeoff. One of our clients, World Agroforestry Centre, works with small-scale farmers in Africa to teach them how to plant trees to increase crop yields. In this case planting trees on the farms helps improve the land. There is less soil erosion and the trees sequester carbon. More food is produced, which means more money, which means farmers can pay to send their children to school, which means greater prosperity overall.

Q: A prior Industry Watch interviewee stated that her agency only works with clients who are sincere in their sustainability efforts - that she was not interested in “green-washing.” Does Metropolitan Group have a similar perspective?

Yes. Authenticity is key for us. Whenever someone, a client, is committed and engaged, it’s obvious. If we go to their offices and there are no recycling boxes, and there are thousands of glossy paper pamphlets lying about, and everyone drives their cars to work—you can see they are not committed to sustainability. But clients hire us to help, and that’s what we set out to do. We try to take them to a new level of awareness, and we show how it can help them as a company. There’s an incredible payoff to sustainable practices, and we help clients see that. Per “green-washing” – fewer and fewer companies are going to get away with that.

Q: How did you come to this type of work?

After 9/11, I started looking for more meaning in my life. I did pro bono work and decided I wanted to devote my time to a better way of being and living. We do work that’s important and we get a fair wage for it. I put a lot of myself, as does everyone at the Metropolitan Group, into the work – more than 40 hours a week. But when it comes to helping someone find work or improve their life, I’m happy to put the time in. When the position with the Metropolitan Group opened up, I jumped on it.

Q: What does the future look like for the kind of work Metropolitan Group does?

There is tremendous growth in sustainable practices in business. Green building for affordable housing. Organic products. Recycled products. Sustainable ways of doing things. More and more, people are choosing businesses for which sustainability is a core issue. It’s exciting to be part of it.

And there’s plenty of room for people and companies to jump in. At Metropolitan Group we always try to walk our talk. We have a triple bottom line – profit-making, contributing to the community and having a zero carbon footprint by 2010. You can do good and make money at the same time. We want other people and organizations to join us.