What is Sustainability?
Everything that we need for our survival and well-being depends, either directly or indirectly, on our natural environment.
Happy People and Happy Homes
Where home products and systems are aligned with both your needs and your values.
What is Sustainability?
"Sustainability means meeting our own needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs… Sustainability is not just environmentalism - embedded in most definitions of sustainability we also find concerns for social equity and economic development."
– McGill University
We began our sustainability journey with a vague understanding that we weren't living a life authentically aligned with our principles.
We also had a lot of questions:
How can one person changing make an impact?
What does a lifestyle aligned with compassion and care mean?
Can it work?
Where do we even start?
Our first breakthrough was understanding that change begins with individuals.
So we got together with friends, family, and like-minded folks and compared notes. Each of us worked to define what our goals were and what our own change needed to look like. And we began at the beginning: making those first incremental changes toward our goals for compassion, sustainability, healing, and happiness.
Upstart Good hasn’t changed much since the beginning: we’re still compassionate, science- and facts-based individuals who believe that many small steps lead to big changes. We believe your daily routine can be sustainable for the planet, as well as simple and repeatable for you. We’re curious and open-minded; as developments around sustainability evolve, so do we. Our support-centric approach provides insights that help you make informed, confident sustainability decisions.
So... how are we helping people?
This is our focus:
We help people organize their homes;
We help them recognize their sticky points and find solutions that work for them;
We provide researched and vetted product recommendations;
We supply restocking and delivery services for zero-waste products to their home;
We manage the donation, removal, and recycling of items no longer needed;
We support continuing understanding, growth, and accomplishment along a journey toward sustainability values.
Why not release what doesn't create more ease and joy?
We can exist without any caveats of what that “should” look like. We’re big into approaches that begin at home to recognize us coming together as a vital and compassionate community:
Sustainable sustainability
Equity across spaces, cultures & peoples
Fairtrade & mutually beneficial economic relationships
Operating from a space that is intentionally positive & compassion-filled
This is a journey of discovery. It begins with an understanding of what brings happiness and purpose to your life, and evolves as you gain insights into how you can tailor your actions to support your goals.
Let’s create a home that functions for you.
We exist to help you bring more organization and functionality to your home and more sustainability to your lifestyle.
Upstart Good is local to Newport, Rhode Island where we provide both in-person services to New York City and the Rhode Island-Eastern Massachusetts-Upper Connecticut region, and virtual services to clients worldwide.
I’m Tory, your friendly sustainability nerd.
While working as a stylist, it became impossible to ignore how the fashion industry is contributing to climate change and the devastating effects it is having on the world. But people still needed to wear clothes and so what was anyone supposed to do?
What began as trying to find some sustainable clothing quickly grew into an obsession with understanding what sustainability really is, why it’s essential, and how to integrate it into my life while still respecting my own needs and limitations.
Upstart Ideas
Why should I care about sustainability?
You should care about sustainability because you care: about people, about nature, about your family, about the future.