About

Background
Green Cities Institute is a new organization in the early stages of its planning, development and operationalization. Currently, we are an official project of Empowerment Works. Founded in 2001, Empowerment Works! (EW) is a 501(c)3 charitable organization increasing collaborative impact amongst citizens, businesses, and organizations through the advancement of a universal framework for Sustainable Development and Public-Private Partnerships. The relationship between Green Cities Institute (GCI) and EW was formed between its respective founders Joseph B. Malki and Melanie St. James while developing the design and architecture for The Global Summit 

Conclusions from the Green Cities Event Series in 2009
The Green Cities Institute was founded on the heels of producing the Green Cities event series in Florida and Alabama in Spring of 2009. This event series successfully engaged the sustainable leadership of two states in a series of workshops, presentations and open space sessions around a holistic framework of green topics. One of the conclusions drawn from producing this event series was that longitudinal multi-generational planning would be necessary to engage sustainability into the fabric of any society’s infrastructure. Another conclusion was that green training solutions for Africa, Central and South America, the Middle East and Asia need to be adapted into hundreds of languages and cultures, which in itself is a colossal undertaking.

Joseph B. Malki met with Ajay Krishnapillai Nair MBA, MURP, GISP during the production and together formed the vision of Green Cities Institute. Ajay’s work in India, China, and the Middle East formed a global picture of massive gaps in sustainability knowledge and practice ranging across sectors from the professional classes of municipal planners and architects to industrial and agricultural technicians. Additionally, the worlds’ poorest people marginalized by urbanism were also determined to have little access to the promise of sustainable and appropriate technology.

The Big Picture
Green Cities Institute (GCI) will develop global partnerships to forge a 200 year plan for the integration of cultural sustainability on a global basis with a focus on Information Communication Technology, Media and Training Acadamies. GCI will become an organizing agent of three main initiatives:

Sustainable ICT
When we consider that the proposition of the quintiple bottom line [People + Planet + Participation + Performance = Prosperity] GCI looks to develop appropriate information Communication Technology in the form of the EcoStrata Database Project and appropriate hardware/software systems to engage mass scale public involvement in ecological restoration, permaculture and the relevant training media appropriate to as many cultures and languages as possible.

Green Media
GCI’s Green Media initiative is being organized around a public-private partnership with Green Cast Productions Inc. (GTV) is a eco-edutainment production firm, based on the classic news, entertainment and educational media production model. Developing  production facilities that focus on native cultural content is our primary goal.

Academies
Realizing that human capital is the expressive agent of sustainability is a central axiom for GCI. Helping establish local permaculture and sustainable entrepreneurial training centers will allow a massive grassroots involvement with sustainability literacy, advancing the green/fair trade economy and engaging local self-sufficiency.