My Sustainability Journey with the Climate Squad

Hi, I’m Barry Brenner, and I’ve spent much of my career working in software development. After working for Corporate America for seven years, I realized that I didn’t fit into the corporate work environment. Have you ever felt this way?

I put together a plan to become an IT consultant and implemented it. When the idea of a trading website was presented to me, I thought that it was a good idea at the time and decided to leverage my software development background and business experience and have the website built by a software development company. I did not have the technical skills to do it myself. Once the website was built and tested, the real challenges came along. Marketing it.

Part of my marketing research led me to discover how many environmentally focused non-profits there are in the United States. So, I decided to incorporate an Affiliate Marketing Program into my website. This program gives non-profits the ability to raise money as well as promote recycling through my Reading, Writing, Arithmetic & Recycling children’s picture story books for grade school students. This also gives me exposure to more eco-conscious customers.

I was working on a Kickstarter project to raise funding for a trading website that I started with a partner 13 years prior. When we first started the project, climate change and recycling were not a popular topic or concern. As I was thinking about how important recycling is to the environment I thought to myself that kids should learn about recycling in grade school through high school just like they are learning about reading, writing, and arithmetic. And when you include the fact that recycling leads to sustainability, which is the future of our environment it’s that important a concept and tool. That was my aha moment.

The first thing that I did was to search the internet for children’s picture story books. Of course there are many for parents to choose from, but I didn’t find any that had incorporated meaningful characters that will grab the parents and children’s interest. This is when I decided to create my group of superheroes utilizing the reduce, reuse, recycle concept and included sustainability as well. What kid doesn’t like superheroes? After choosing the four main characters in my story, I decided to call them The Climate Squad. Their mission is to teach as many kids as possible about recycling and why it is so important.

Since I had never written a book before, I researched and found an excellent ghost writer to get it done. They have helped over four thousand authors with developing and writing a manuscript. Their process was simple. Send them your purpose of the book along with the important points that you want included, and anything specific to be added, and they will send back a first draft for your review. I did exactly as they asked and after receiving the first and second drafts with minor changes, Once the final English manuscript was done, I had it translated into Spanish. There are millions of Spanish speaking families in the United States who should be teaching their kids about recycling..

I live in Washington State, so when I learned about a new type of corporation that is only available in Florida, California, and Washington State, I closed my LLC and incorporated as Climate Squad Publishing, SPC. SPC stands for Social Purpose Corporation. My plan is to eventually achieve B Corp Certification.