When Ms. Dicky Sykes, the Director of the Office of Diversity in Business Practices (ODBP), started her new role at the District last August she knew she could make a difference. Her mission included encouraging, training and working with small, minority and women-owned businesses to better position themselves to obtain District opportunities and conserve resources. 

The District had already changed over from a paper-based certification application process to electronic. This simple switch allowed the department to go from printing 84 pages per applicant to only four pages. The next step was eliminating the District certification fee of $150.00 for both SBE and M/WBE certification applications. The fee was eliminated on October 9, 2017 and since then, 150 firms have certified, averaging about a 75% monthly increase, think about all the trees that were saved!

However, Ms. Sykes said they are just getting started on doing what they can to save the planet and reduce cost:   When hosting major conferences the ODBP does not print presenter's bios but rather produces a PowerPoint presentation of rolling bios for attendees to read. During the last major event, the Women's Empowerment Summit held on March 20, 2018, the office saved over 1,000 pages from this alone!  Additionally, they have started printing handout materials utilizing both sides of the paper.