• Warren Karlenzig
• Jean Rogers
• Harrison Fraker
• Allison Quaid
• Kenneth Ott
• Partners

Present and recent clients include the Guangzhou Planning Agency; the Global Forum on Human Settlements; the Shanghai 2010 World Expo Bureau; the US Department of State; the Asian Institute for Energy, Environment and Sustainability; the David and Lucile Packard Foundation; the non-governmental organization Ecocity Builders; a major mixed-use real estate development corporation; an educational sustainability non-profit; and global corporations.

Warren has appeared in media including The Wall Street Journal, CNN, CNBC, Forbes, The New York Times and The Washington Post.

The former Chief Strategy Officer of SustainLane, he devised, planned, designed and directed both the SustainLane US City Rankings and the SustainLane Government knowledge base for sustainability best practices in state and local governments. He also led consulting engagements with the State of California focused on green city performance metrics for a successful pilot program.

As Lead Strategist for Dimension Data/ Proxicom, Warren led executive-level strategy engagements for clients including General Electric and Chevron. His area of expertise included developing corporate knowledge management initiatives directly impacting corporate governance, supported by systems utilizing complex intellectual property information and data management. Warren previously served as editor-in-chief for Knowledge Management magazine. He has been a consultant with clients including the White House Office of Science and Technology, for which he helped plan an eco-industrial park; the US EPA Futures Group and the US Department of Energy. He authored A Blueprint for Greening Affordable Housing, the first substantial work on the subject (Global Green USA, 1999) and he co-authored San Francisco's influential Sustainability Plan, which was adopted by the city in 1997. The section he co-authored ("Economy and Economic Development") was directly cited in San Francisco's 1999 and 2003 green building ordinances.

How Green is Your City?, which Warren authored, was published in 2007 by New Society Publishers, and he contributed a chapter to Growing Greener Cities: Urban Sustainability in the 21st Century published in 2008 by the University of Pennsylvania Press and the Wharton School of Business. Warren is on the Boards of The Climate Change Center and the Korea Green Foundation. He has an MFA from Naropa University and a Bachelor of Science degree from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is a Fellow with The Post Carbon Institute and CEO of the Institute for Strategic Resilience based in Shanghai, China and California.

What People are Saying About Common Current:

"(The Shanghai Manual on Sustainable Cities co-authored by Common Current's Warren Karlenzig) details the experience and practices of cities across the world in addressing common challenges and achieving harmonious development ... and is therefore of great theoretical and practical value."

-- Shanghai Mayor Han Zheng (at the publication's
launch)

Jean is currently leading the development of a sustainability strategy for SITRA, the Finnish Innovation Fund in Helsinki, intended to catalyze national change in the building related sectors through targeted investment and policy. Jean led the team behind the California Academy of Sciences’ recent $285M museum achieving LEED Platinum status, and has been involved in other high profile projects in the San Francisco region, including the award-winning redevelopment plan for Treasure Island.

Prior to Arup, Jean was Director of Strategy at Razorfish, leveraging the power of digital platforms to catalyze sustainability in businesses, and she was also a management consultant at Deloitte, working in the environmental and manufacturing practices to help leading companies improve business and product performance. She is a former Loeb Fellow at Harvard University who has authored multiple publications and won several awards. She is a USGBC LEED Accredited Professional, a member of the World Affairs Council, and a member of the Urban Land Institute Responsible Property Investing Council. Dr. Jean Rogers holds a PhD in Environmental Engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology, and an ME in Environmental Engineering and a BE in Civil Engineering, both from Manhattan College.

Harrison Fraker Jr. is professor of architecture and former dean of UC Berkeley's College of Environmental Design, and a pioneer in passive solar, daylighting and sustainable-design research and teaching. He has published seminal articles on the design potential of sustainable systems and urban-design principles for transit-oriented neighborhoods. An award-winning architect, Fraker is pursuing a whole-systems design approach for entirely resource-self-sufficient, transit-oriented neighborhoods of 100,000 people in China, and recently led an initiative to design three transit-oriented neighborhoods for Tianjin, a city of 11 million. His current research activity includes affordable manufactured housing, urban design, sustainable development, and ecological design.

Harrison Fraker was educated as an architect and urban designer at Princeton and Cambridge Universities. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal for creating a new College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the University of Minnesota and was appointed the founding Dean.

Allison has consulted to the World Bank and USAID on international environmental projects. She is a LEED Accredited Professional and a board member of the International Sustainability Indicators Network. Allison is an Advisory Board member for the Business Council on Climate Change. Allison holds a Bachelor of Science in Environmental Science from Rutgers University and Masters in Urban and Environmental Public Policy from Tufts University.

After returning stateside Ken decided to start a restaurant grease collection company to produce biodiesel only to join an existing startup with like-minded people. He sold his last remaining car in 2006. Ken's current side projects include blogging about urban planning and suburban sustainability retrofitting efforts, operating a cycle rickshaw business in downtown Oakland and organic gardening.

Ken earned his Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of California at Berkeley. He is a board member of Urban Releaf, an urban forestry research and tree planting organization based in Oakland.

Partners

Building on its work in sustainability since 2007, the firm has expanded its portfolio of services, and recently completed a Best Practices study on sustainability management with 25 leading firms in technology, consumer goods, and Media & Entertainment. Participants included Cisco, Dell, HP, P&G, Disney, and 20 other similar blue-chip companies. Several topics were addressed from strategy to communications, with the intent to help companies become more sustainable throughout their value chain.

Earlier in his career, Vijay was a senior consultant at Deloitte Consulting, and later at A.T. Kearney. Vijay also spent a distinguished career at Sun Microsystems where he worked in a variety of executive roles in the marketing and sales organizations.

Vijay holds an MBA from the Wharton School, a Bachelor's in Electrical Engineering, and is a certified management consultant, awarded to less than 1% of professionals in this field.