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If Adam Hammes decides someday to run for public office, he’s the kind of guy who would probably get elected. But for now, the gregarious 28-year-old is pouring his energy and leadership skills into building Urban Ambassadors, a not-for-profit organization devoted to “planting the seeds of sustainability” through a program of education, action and replicable projects.

Urban Ambassadors plans to serially develop sustainability seed projects that other organizations can adopt as their own, as well as provide online resources for businesses, individuals and communities. One of its primary objectives is to develop a business model that is itself sustainable, so that it can serve as an ongoing resource for sustainability education.

“It’s a pretty exciting time to be in business,” said Hammes, “because we’re seeing a whole new wave of business models that are healthy, responsible and inspiring to people of all ages. I would love Iowa to be at the forefront of that.”

One of Urban Ambassadors’ initial projects, the Transforming Business Speaker Series, begins this week. The organization secured sponsorships from nonprofits such as the Center on Sustainable Communities (COSC) as well as major companies such as Meredith Corp. to bring nationally recognized experts on sustainability to Des Moines.

Among the organization’s long-term goals is to establish a physical presence in Des Moines, ideally on a grayfield building site that has been renovated to incorporate best practices of sustainability. Hammes hopes such a site could also provide shared office space for other environmental organizations. Additionally, he envisions Des Moines as the nexus for sustainability training to be conducted by Urban Ambassadors in several Midwest cities, including Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City and Omaha.

Though the term sustainability has many different interpretations, the most popular definition can be traced to a 1987 United Nations conference, which stated that sustainability in the context of development is “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

Creating a Central Iowa-based organization focused on sustainability education is the latest step in a professional journey for Hammes. The native Iowan’s work with environmental education organizations has taken him as far away as Costa Rica, Ecuador and Japan. Before moving to Des Moines last year, the University of Northern Iowa graduate worked for two years in California with Ambassadors of the Environment, a youth education program of Jean-Michel Cousteau’s Ocean Futures Society.

Since returning to Iowa, Hammes has networked with Greater Des Moines’ environmental and business communities, and assembled a diverse board of directors.

“We have a very talented, fresh group of people from a lot of different areas, which is what we need, because we do a lot of different things,” said Hammes, who has a bachelor’s degree in human services from UNI with minors in business and international studies, and a master of business administration degree from the Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield. He recently received the Leadership in Energy Efficiency and Design Accredited Professional (LEED AP) designation from the Green Building Certification Institute.

The Natural Step

The speaker series begins Wednesday with Bob Willard, author of “The Next Sustainability Wave” and “The Sustainability Advantage,” who will speak at 6 p.m. at the Polk County Convention Complex. Other speakers scheduled are Bill Witherspoon, founder of the Sustainability Research Institute and CEO of The Sky Factory LC in Fairfield, on May 27; and on June 10, Ray Anderson, founder and chairman of Interface Inc., who was named “Greenest CEO” by Time magazine.

“We want to get as many business people as we can to this speaker series,” Hammes said. “Not that we want them to just become gaga over the environment, but we want them to see this as a business strategy that cuts costs, that creates competitive advantage for the company and opens up new markets they have not been tapping into.”

One of Urban Ambassadors’ goals is to bring Natural Step Framework training to Des Moines. Up to 50 people who attend all three sessions of the speakers series will be able to attend a “Using the Natural Step Framework” workshop scheduled on June 22. First developed in Sweden in the late 1980s, the strategic decision-making model has been adopted by thousands of businesses, local governments and nonprofit organizations.

Jenny McCoy, Meredith’s director of corporate communications, said she and other members of her company’s sustainability task force plan to attend the series and the Natural Step training. The publishing company has worked extensively to incorporate environmentally sustainable concepts into its businesses over the past several years.

“We don’t have experience with Natural Step specifically, which is why I’m excited to go and learn more about it,” McCoy said. Meredith has agreed to provide conference space for the training session in return for being a sponsor.

COSC’s executive director, Lynnae Hentzen, said she views Urban Ambassadors’ goals as complementary to those of her organization, which is now 4 years old, and she is encouraging her staff to attend the speaker series and training.

“The more groups that can be working this from different angles, the better,” Hentzen said. “We work to fill holes where extra push is needed. Our core focus is on the built environment, not only residential, but we’re starting to work with commercial with the U.S. Green Building Council. We’re in the process now of developing a statewide sustainable building program to bring it up a notch and ensure there’s high-quality training going on all over the state.”

Multitasking

Treating each day like a non-renewable resource, Hammes has gotten Urban Ambassadors off the ground by squeezing every available moment from every 24 hours.

Besides organizing the speaker series, he and his board members have been busy preparing to file for 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status and seeking out government and nonprofit funding sources.

“It’s really all I do (outside of work),” said Hammes, who juggles a full-time job as a customer service representative at ING Groep NV with teaching evening classes in leadership for William Penn University and the Industrial Learning Center at Iowa State University. One of his other jobs, before funding reductions eliminated it, was working as an instructor with the Adventure Learning Center, a youth leadership program of the Des Moines Independent Community School District.

“I think traveling really helped me to learn to be flexible and dynamic (in finding work),” he said. “The downfall is, I always want to do something I love. I was working three part-time jobs that I loved. It took me a lot to swallow my pride and get a corporate job at ING to give me the financial stability to get this organization going.”

Hammes said his work with Ambassadors of the Environment spurred his ideas for Urban Ambassadors.

“It’s the only program I’ve ever worked with that teaches youth specifically sustainability, not environmental education, which can often be just ‘science outside,'” he said. “We talked about communities, people issues, transportation, energy, waste and biodiversity.”

While working with that program, Hammes had the opportunity to sit down one evening with Cousteau and biologist Richard Murphy to discuss his ideas for the program he wanted to create in Iowa. “That was the first time someone I thought very highly of validated my ideas,” he said, “and now I have the confidence to go do this because Richard Murphy and Jean-Michel Cousteau said it’s a good idea.”

Hammes wrote the business plan for Urban Ambassadors late last year while riding on a three-week, 750-mile sustainable-living bicycle tour from San Francisco to the Mexican border, which had some Des Moines-based sponsors. A number of California schools whose students had been involved in the Ambassadors of the Environment program followed the daily blog posts and videos from the tour as part of their science classes. Hammes is now working with environmental groups and cycling enthusiasts in Iowa to try to spur interest in a similar sustainable bicycle tour.

Urban Ambassadors also worked with students from Drake University’s Drake Environmental Action League (D.E.A.L.) to coordinate a zero-waste, carbon-neutral sustainable spring break trip to Catalina Island, in which the students participated in workshops and hands-on environmental projects. “We’re basically sending that (idea) to all the colleges so that they can plan one themselves,” Hammes said. “We have a few people that are interested in doing this as a business, or integrating it into what they already do, which would be fantastic.”

Hammes counts the speaker series as Urban Ambassadors’ third seed project.

“For all of our seed projects, we want to do it once and do it right, and never have to do it again,” he said. “We want someone else to see the value in it, adopt it and do it themselves. For (the speaker series), we really hand-picked our sponsors; we went to the people we knew were doing good work, that were passionate about sustainability and that we would like to highlight in the community to let more people know about.”

The organization’s Web site, www.urbanambassadors.wetpaint.com, will be an important teaching resource, Hammes said, and include links to programs and organizations in Greater Des Moines and Iowa.

“Our plan is to have our new Web site rolled out this summer,” he said. “It’s going to be professionally done, very user-friendly, with very specific action steps that we ask people to do, and it’s going to be very clear why we ask people to do these things.”