You have just taken a job two years after graduation. This is an important opportunity for you and a very exciting challenge. The nonprofit that hired you is called: ‘Sustainable Legacy' and it has a very unique mission to bring sustainable technology to young families, recent college graduates and low-income people.

This nonprofit was created to promote and fund long-term decisions about technology that will have a significant impact on environmental conservation, pollution abatement and climate change.

The approach is to look at a group of people who may very well want to make good decisions about sustainable products, but who have very little time to research the issues and very little money to buy the more sustainable product.

This nonprofit hopes to instill in these people a legacy that values sustainability and environmental responsibility and a continuing commitment to these causes. Ideally the recipients of these grants will consider giving back to the nonprofit as they become more comfortable financially and want to make a difference for future generations.

The ‘Sustainable Legacy' nonprofit was founded with a several million-dollar grant from a much larger foundation. This money not only pays for operating costs, but also provides money to support sustainable investments for people who apply for the funds.

Fortunately Sustainable Legacy has very good leadership in the area of money managing, publicity and fund raising. It has proven very challenging to find someone to evaluate technology.

It is important to consider technology at a number of levels and to consider the long-term impacts. Often the technology is more expensive and not affordable to younger and low-income peoples. Sometimes the technology does not seem that exciting, but will provide long-term benefits for the environment and for the people who use it. The choices about technology should be based on a disciplined and defensible format. It is important for the nonprofit to justify these investments to the groups and individuals who have donated funds.

Assignment:

As technology advisor you are required to set up a format for identifying technology. This technology should provide the opportunity to be advantageous, useful and durable for the people who buy into it.

While the Sustainable Legacy foundation has a general idea about what impacts it wants to achieve, it lacks the understanding to develop a working process for identifying and evaluating technology. The first task for you is to setup this procedure so that others can understand and participate in this work.

Another important part of this work is to consider the impact of this technology. The Sustainable Legacy foundation wants to be able to project how choosing this technology will not only impact energy / resource savings, but how it will life-style decisions and behavior awareness. Potentially these technology decisions could have an impact on climate change if there is widespread adoption. These benefits should be assessed and documented.

As part of this assessment process, Sustainable Legacy would like for you to thoughtfully consider some of the possible negative implications of this technology. The leadership is fully aware that there is a downside for any innovation.

They are concerned that these issues be thoroughly assessed and documented. They do not want to have the negative consequences identified later and to be blamed for promoting anything that had unintended consequences that greatly negated the initial benefits of the technology.