About Me

A global leader in sustainability and social entrepreneurship, Bill joined the faculty of the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado Boulder in July 2008, where he is the inaugural Chair in Sustainable Development and Director of the Initiative for Development and Sustainability. He is also a founding Partner of the Innovation Network for Communities, a national organization launched in early 2007 to develop and spread scalable social innovations in areas such as economic development and urban sustainability. From December 2007 to August 2008, Bill served as the Interim Executive Director of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, the world’s fastest growing network of sustainable businesses, and was President and CEO of the Orton Family Foundation from 2004-2006. Prior to this, Bill spent twelve years in the Boston/Cambridge area where he founded and led the acclaimed environmental justice center Alternatives for Community & Environment and later New Ecology, Inc., a pioneering green development research and consulting organization. From 1998-2004, he taught in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, where he is a Research Affiliate, and was an Adjunct Professor of Law at Boston College Law School from 1993-2004. He is also an Associate of the Citistates Group, the nation’s foremost think-tank and speakers’ bureau for metropolitanism and regional development.

Bill is the author of two books, the award-winning The Land That Could Be: Environmentalism and Democracy in the Twenty-First Century, and A Republic of Trees, Field Notes on People, Place and the Planet. He has been a commentator for Vermont Public Radio and the web magazine TomPaine.com and is a contributing writer for Northern Woodlands magazine and a published poet. Bill has been featured in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, U.S. News & World Report and on National Public Radio, as well as in the book, Eco-Pioneers: Practical Visionaries Solving Today's Environmental Problems. He has served on several federal and state policymaking committees and has advised governments, businesses and non-profits across the U.S. and abroad on environmental and sustainable development policy. In 2001, he was selected as one of the Boston Business Journal's "40 Under 40" most promising leaders. David Brower described Bill as "an environmental visionary creating solutions to today's problems with a passion that would make John Muir and Martin Luther King equally proud."

Bill earned an AB in History and Classics from Brown University, an MA in History and JD from the University of Virginia and completed doctoral studies in Jurisprudence and Social Policy as a Regents Fellow at the University of California at Berkeley. He was a law clerk to Chief Judge Franklin S. Billings, Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the District of Vermont. Bill has received numerous public service awards and fellowships and has served as a trustee of several organizations, including the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, Echoing Green and The Funders’ Network for Smart Growth and Livable Communities. He’s also an advisor to a number of triple bottom-line companies, including Demeter BioEnergy, Green Coast Enterprises and PowerHouse. He lives in Boulder, Colorado with his wife Sally Handy and two children, Olivia and Shepard.