William Shutkin
Until the summer of 2016, I spent the first 25 years of my career in the non-profit sector, advocating, teaching, lawyering, writing and entrepreneuring for social change and sustainable, equitable communities.
When I turned 50, I pledged to myself that, if and when the opportunity arose, and with sustainability now more or less mainstream, I would try my hand at the for-profit world, take what I have learned and taught and apply it as a sustainable real estate developer, believing this is no oxymoron but instead, given the state of things, a mandate, a call to action. Words into deeds, like the other organizations I’ve founded, but this time with an equity stake. That’s how Shutkin Sustainable Living came to be.
Biography
Social entrepreneur, executive, attorney and educator, William Shutkin has been at the forefront of the sustainability field for over three decades. David Brower, the father of the modern environmental movement, described him as “an environmental visionary creating solutions to today’s problems with a passion that would make John Muir and Martin Luther King equally proud.”
Shutkin is principal of Shutkin Sustainable Living, a social impact developer based in Boulder, Colorado, focused on green, mixed-use, mixed-income, infill development projects in Boulder and other select U.S. cities. SSL currently has over $240MM in development completed or under construction, including 200 inclusionary housing units and the Boulder region’s first permanently affordable commercial space.
Shutkin is also Teaching Associate Professor and Associate Director of the Masters of the Environment program at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he leads the Urban Resilience and Sustainability specialization.
From 2011 to 2016, Shutkin was President and CEO and Richard M. Gray Fellow in Sustainability Practice at Presidio Graduate School in San Francisco. Prior to Presidio, he was on the faculty of the University of Denver Sturm College of Law, where he was director of the Rocky Mountain Land Use Institute, and was inaugural chair in sustainable real estate at the University of Colorado Boulder Leeds School of Business. From 1999-2009, Shutkin was a faculty member in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT and, from 1993-2004, taught at Boston College Law School.
Shutkin cofounded the Boston-based environmental justice law center, Alternatives for Community & Environment, in 1993 as an Echoing Green Fellow. In 1999, he founded New Ecology, Inc., the sustainable community development organization in Boston that today has offices in three states and over 50 staff. NEI made the first business case for greening low-income housing, the landmark 2003 report “The Costs and Benefits of Green Affordable Housing,” and, in partnership with Boston Community Capital, launched Wegowise, a best-in-class online tool for energy and water conservation in multi-family buildings.
He has been featured in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, U.S. News & World Report and on National Public Radio, and is the author of the award-winning book, 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.
Shutkin is co-host of The Sustainable City podcast and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Climate Resilience and Climate Justice, an open-access, online journal published by MIT Press.
Shutkin received an AB from Brown University and a JD and MA from the University of Virginia. He also completed PhD studies as a Regents Fellow at the University of California Berkeley and attended the Executive Program in Business Strategies for Environmental Sustainability at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Shutkin was a law clerk for U.S. District Court Chief Judge Franklin S. Billings, Jr. He is an avid telemark skier, trail runner, hiker and musician, and a published poet.