>> ... Next Generation ... Professionals Vision For iv wainsint In The eil Greenberg was born to ride. For as long as he can remember, the 30-year-old native Detroiter has been obsessed with mass transportation. "I was at the People Mover on the day it opened in 1987," he recalls. "I was 5 years old. My parents picked up my grandma in Oak Park, and we went down to the Bricktown Station for a ride." He also has fond memories of a weekend trip to Chicago five years later. "We took a quick ride on the 146 bus from North Michigan Avenue and Delaware near the Water Tower to the Shedd Aquarium campus near Soldier Field," he remembers. "I was so enthralled with the details of it all, the numbers, maps and schedules. I thought, 'This is so cool, there are so many things to wonder about.' " Greenberg's early experiences with mass transit got him thinking. "The more I grew fascinated with it, the more I saw how essential it was for healthy cities to have a great transit system." His preoccupation became his occupation. "Long story short, it became a career for me. I've worn a lot of different hats in the transit industry. It's my job." Freshwater website helps Detroiters picture how it could work here. ALLAN NAHAJEWSKI I CONTRIBUTING WRITER Wehsite With A Vision If you Google "Freshwater Railway," you'll find a website that looks too good to be true, but there it is — maps and schedules for trains and buses that can take you just about anywhere in southeast Michigan — "Detroit, Ann Arbor, Port Huron, Flint, Toledo, Howell, Adrian, Jackson, Windsor and all points in between." But here's the secret: It's fictional. It's Neil Greenberg's vision of what mass transit in Detroit could be like in mind-blowing detail. "Freshwater Railway was intended as nothing more than a visual to get Detroiters to understand what transit looks like," he says. "Many people in this area don't have a first-hand reference point of what mass transit is." The website was designed to make the imaginary appear real. "If you're from the Detroit area, you know we don't have a good transit system," he says. "Freshwater Railway is designed to throw that conventional wisdom into question for one precious moment. When you land on the home page, it looks real and official. You think, wait a minute, could it be? It's designed to engage you in ways that a lot of other conversations about transit cannot." Greenberg says he doesn't know how people Bishop Airport RAI L SYSTEM .yr. Fli Port Huron Grand Blanc Southeast Michigan Regional North Rang Warwick Hill Holl Richmond New Ha Davisburg Auburn Hills Chesterfield Columbia Drayton Plans Howell Morley/Selfridge Pontiac Cbilsen Centerpoint Clemens roy/Birmingharn Fraser Hamburg Koval Oak Whitmore Lake arren/Roseville Ferndale Eastpointe Olivet Ann Arbor Sumrni Baltimore Deg. cg n C Chelsea Sylvan Center Ann Arbor Westsiele Ec orse/Lincoln Park Grass Lake Center Lake I ver Rouge Boardwalk/Briarwood andotte Saline Trenton Rockwood LJJ Newport Luna Pier Dundee leis Addition i FRESHWATER RAILWAY fwrail.org Toledo fortrove information Alternatives Based tusinAN Community of food entrepreneurs encourages each other's success. HARRY KIRSBAUM I CONTRIBUTING WRITER 52 November 29 • 2012 I t's not just the bottom line; it's the in a covenantal relationship with God where triple bottom line. And according we are just as responsible for being stewards of to a growing movement of young justice and Godliness, and God is being good to Detroit business entrepreneurs, it's us in return." a way to be idealistic and realistic at the FoodLab has grown into something that same time. is a really exciting model for how we can be John Elkington, the founder of the connecting values to business in a modern British organization SustainAbility, coined context, Nosan said, but this differs from the the phrase triple bottom line (TBL) social, anti-business activism of the 1960s and in 1994. He posited that companies '70s. Jess Daniel, founder of should be preparing three different "Social entrepreneurs are less focused on FoodLab (and, according to The Economist, quite reactive activism and are more focused on separate) bottom lines — the financial, pragmatic approaches to change," said Nosan social and environmental performance of of Detroit. "Values-based business is considered a corporation over a period of time. a mechanism by which social/environmental During a lunch-and-learn session values can create change within an existing at the Isaac Agree Detroit Synagogue capitalist system, which is markedly different on Nov. 5, Blair Nosan, chair of the from choosing to work outside that system." Education and Social Action Committee, Financially supported by the nonprofit introduced Jess Daniel, founder of Detroiters Working for Environmental Justice FoodLab Detroit, a TBL "community of and a small stipend as a graduate student at practice" of food entrepreneurs that Michigan State University, Daniel's FoodLab Blair Nosan supports the development, growth and Detroit operates under the assumption that not cooperation of locally owned, socially everyone in business is looking only to maximize and environmentally responsible food profits. Some of these people have jobs and are enterprises. doing it as supplemental income — running a sustainable "What we're talking about is attaching economic business that makes a profit, but not enough for them to development and business to values," Nosan said. "We are subsist. It's providing ancillary social benefits, she said.