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In January 2022, we celebrated our seventh anniversary in business by announcing the launch of the RENEW PR LGBTQIA Endowed Scholarship at the Texas Tech Alumni Association. The annual scholarship provides funding for an LGBTQIA student in the college of Arts and Sciences or any LGBTQIA student in a college at Texas Tech who plans to study abroad. And last month, we celebrated the first recipient of this scholarship (from last year): Doan Tran . The idea behind this schol

Earlier this year, I had the pleasure and privilege of being interviewed by renowned Professional Certified Coach Ken Jacobs for his monthly column in PRSA's Strategies and Tactics newspaper on my "commitment to DEI." Strategies & Tactics editor John Elsasser kindly granted me permission to reprint the Q&A in its entirety from the June-July 2023 issue of the newspaper. My thanks to John for his permission and to Ken for this terrific conversation. Ben Finzel's Commitment t

Last year, we celebrated our seventh anniversary in business by announcing the debut of the RENEW PR LGBTQIA Endowed Scholarship at the Texas Tech Alumni Association for LGBTQIA students at Texas Tech University. We decided to honor our “seven years of good luck” by giving back to help others. The annual scholarship provides funding for an LGBTQIA student in the college of Arts and Sciences or any LGBTQIA student in a college at Texas Tech who plans to study abroad. As we

Pride Month is a great time to introduce you to another inspiring LGBTQ leader. Elena Joy Thurston is the CEO of the Pride & Joy Foundation . In this role, her mission is, “to prevent suicide and homelessness in the LGBTQ+ community by fostering allyship, empowering advocates, and creating opportunities for LGBTQ+ visibility.” The Pride & Joy Foundation is small (for now), but mighty. They provide virtual programming focused on preparing LGBTQ+ people for leadership and engag

This weekend, I had the pleasure and privilege of delivering the 2023 Texas Tech University Lavender Graduation Speech . I'm an alumnus of Texas Tech University (B.A. History, 1989) and this was my first trip back to Texas Tech since graduating nearly 34 years ago! As I've written here in the past , my Texas Tech education, life in Texas and study abroad experience helped make me who I am today. So I was particularly excited to have an opportunity to share that story with thi

Every January brings us more than just a celebration of a new calendar year: at RENEW PR , it’s also the start of another year in business. We opened for business on January 23, 2015 , so today is the eighth anniversary of our launch. It’s been an incredible eight years: we’ve worked with more than 40 clients , helped secure several important changes in federal law, promoted new cleantech policies and even won an award in the process. Over these eight years, we’ve sharpened

We don’t talk as much about our work on equity in this series as we should so we’re addressing that omission. One way is to highlight the work of our colleagues and business partners in The Change Agencies , the national network of multicultural and LGBTQ owned and operated public relations agencies we helped launch in June of 2019. This month, we’re shining a spotlight on the agency leaders we have the pleasure and privilege of collaborating with to run The Change Agencies:

Although our work is generally focused in the United States, we are beginning to have opportunities to bring our expertise in communicating about energy to clients working in other parts of the world. One of the first such clients is Greenwood Energy , a part of The Libra Group , and a partner firm to our client Greenwood Sustainable Infrastructure (GSI). [To learn more about GSI, read our Common Sense Colloquy Q&A with their CEO, Mazen Turk, from earlier this year here .] G

With so much happening in the energy and environment communities this year, it can be challenging to determine what to focus on for this monthly series of interviews. One topic of particular interest to many of our audiences is sustainability and corporate responsibility. I’ve been encouraged to see the importance of these issues increase over the past few decades to the point where they are now front and center in the national conversation and key drivers of business and pol

Equity is one of the three areas of focus for RENEW PR (along with energy and environment). We define the term as meaning that “everyone has the opportunities, resources and support they need to participate fully in society.” For us, that seems like common sense – and it is, or it should be. Equity is often considered along with diversity, inclusion and other concepts as part of a broader conversation about the actions necessary to ensure full engagement of everyone in socie

We've now completed a whirlwind Pride Month 2022. It was a month filled with highs and lows, like any month in the past few years, frankly. What was different this year was the sense that, as the Museum of Public Relations said in their annual Pride event title this year, LGBTQ rights are on the line . That sense was reinforced on June 24th, when the Supreme Court announced their ruling in the Dobbs case, declaring that women no longer had control over their own reproductive

Every Pride Month of the past few years has felt unlike any other in recent memory. With so much happening so fast, and attacks and assaults on LGBTQ people ramping up in the courts, in statehouses and on the streets, it makes sense that many of us are tired, depressed, fearful, and fed-up. Fortunately, there are many LGBTQ people and allies working to push back and make the world a better place for all of us. One such group of LGBTQ people and allies is PFLAG National . Fou

These are tough times. With so much hate, division and fear in our society and the continued impacts of the health, racial justice and economic pandemics affecting many of us, it can be hard to find or feel joy. So, what better time to ask our friend Patrice Tanaka to participate in the Common Sense Colloquy ? Patrice is the Founder & Chief Joy Officer of Joyful Planet, LLC , a “ Business & Life Strategy Consultancy” to help individuals and organizations discover and activel

Celebrating, honoring and acknowledging Pride Month is more important this year than ever (and it should be celebrated all year, not just during one month). The expected Supreme Court ruling that will undermine the right to bodily autonomy and privacy is just the latest assault on communities like ours. Legislators in statehouses and city halls across the country are ramping up their attacks on the LGBTQ community, and they are being particularly virulent towards transgender

The role of institutional investors in climate change mitigation is not always well understood, despite a great deal of attention being paid to the impact of such investments in driving business changes designed to help address the global threat of a changing climate. At the same time, diversity, equity and inclusion decisions are increasingly important to investment considerations and are now contemplated in concert with climate and related topics. Fortunately, we have a fri

Substantively and effectively addressing climate change is a multi-layered challenge. We need to reduce and eventually eliminate emissions (which technologies such as carbon capture, utilization and storage will help with), and we need to remove existing or legacy emissions as well (which technologies such as carbon removal will help with). In this series, we’re trying to address climate change and other important topics in as many ways as possible. This month, we’re focusing

The Common Sense Colloquy requires a good deal of effort, but the opportunity to share the insight and perspective of the smart people we work and collaborate with is worth it. In this, the third post in our Year Four in Review series, we share my favorite comments from our twelve participants over the past year. In addition to being smart and insightful, the comments below share a few things in common: they address the value of authenticity, the importance of equity and the

Every year at this time for the past three years, we have highlighted the best of the best from our Common Sense Colloquy series: key advice and perspective on communications from a diverse group of energy, environmental and LGBTQ leaders who participated in our monthly Q&A series. In this, the second post in our three-part series marking the end of the fourth year of the Common Sense Colloquy, we’re sharing insight from twelve influential communications and advocacy leaders

Four years ago, I had an idea for a series of Q&As with interesting energy and environment leaders. In February 2018, I posted the first of what I hoped would be an ongoing series of useful conversations sharing insight on common sense conversations. Our client Marcene Mitchell set a high bar with that first interview and every person since then has demonstrated that this wasn’t just a good idea, it was an insightful one. The nearly fifty conversations we’ve had since that

Energy policy is now also climate policy. Decisions about what types of energy sources to build for the future are now inextricably linked with their impact on the planet. As this connection has become ever more obvious, interest in nuclear energy has grown. But challenges remain, to be sure. This month’s Q&A subject is Jessica Lovering , co-founder of Good Energy Collective (GEC). Jessica stepped into that breach to build the “ progressive case for nuclear energy as an e