Shel Horowitz

Early life

Born in New York City on December 24, 1956, Horowitz was raised in the Bronx, New York where he graduated from Bronx High School of Science in 1973. While attending Antioch College the following three years, he alternated studies with work in Washington, D.C. and Atlanta. He graduated from Antioch College 1977, and after finishing, lived in New York (principally [[Brooklyn]], Providence, and Philadelphia) before settling in the Northampton-Amherst, Massachusetts area in 1981.

Marketing

The first of his books on marketing was published in 1985, and he has written several other award-winning books and hundreds of articles on marketing—particularly ethical marketing, marketing for green and social entrepreneurship companies, organizations involved in social change or promoting the environment, and frugal marketing. Stressing values-based, big-picture marketing that tends to be less expensive than traditional approaches, he develops marketing methods and materials based in such techniques as forming partnerships, attracting media publicity, and using social media effectively. His most recent book, co-authored with the late Jay Conrad Levinson, "Father of Guerrilla Marketing," is Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, published in 2016 by Morgan James and including guest essays by Cynthia Kersey, Frances Moore Lappé, and Yanik Silver. He and Levinson also collaborated on the earlier Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green, published by John Wiley & Sons in 2010. Known as "The Transformpreneur," he addresses the intersections of marketing and social change/environmental improvement through speaking, writing, and consulting.

Horowitz has been marketing online since 1994, and using social media since 1995. He set up the first of about 16 currently operating websites in 1996 and his most recent, http://goingbeyondsustainability.com in 2015.

Speaking

Horowitz has spoken to numerous environmental conferences, academic institutions, professional associations, and business gatherings, both in the United Stages and abroad. His many speaking credits include a TEDx talk on the theme of business profiting by creating a better world, Forum Davos in Switzerland, Bioneers-by-the-Bay, multiple Green America Green Festivals, Gulf Coast Green, Solarfest, Association for Business Communication International Conference, Sustainable Foods Summit, Public Relations Society of America, American Society of Journalists and Authors, Scaling Change, Noteworthy USA National Conference, regional gatherings of the American Marketing Association, National Association of Home Remodelers, and Publishers Marketing Association, Book Expo America, Smith College, Mount Holyoke College, University of Vermont…

Media presence

He has been cited multiple times in such publications as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Entrepreneur, Christian Science Monitor, Los Angeles Times, and The Bottom Line. He has published his own articles in the Washington Post, In Business, Boston Globe, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, GreenBiz, and many other publications.

From 2010 to 2014, he wrote a syndicated monthly column, Green And Profitable. The column covered how to "go green" authentically and was featured internationally including the USA and Australia. The column has been published in Green Prospects Asia (Malaysia), World.edu (Australia) and the Daily Hampshire Gazette, in Northampton, Massachusetts. Following the discontinuance of the column, Horowitz anthologized many of the articles in his ninth book, Green And Profitable. He began regularly blogging in 2004, and his blog has been hosted at Green And Profitable since 2010.

In 2014, he began to focus on showing how business can profit by transforming hunger and poverty into sufficiency, violence and war into peace, and catastrophic climate change/environmental degradation into planetary balance. He expanded his web presence in this area with two new websites that went live in 2015, "Going Beyond Sustainability" aimed at the corporate world, and, "Transformpreneur" for entrepreneurs.

All told, Horowitz has been quoted or cited in over 70 books.

Horowitz was the reporter for the UMass Family Business Center newsletter, Related Matters, for 14 years (1994-2008).

Environmental and social change involvement

Horowitz has been involved with numerous social and environmental movements and community betterment groups since the early 1970s, and helped to defeat a nuclear power plant proposed just north of New York City as far back as 1972.

His first book, published in 1980, demonstrated why solar and other clean energy technologies, and not nuclear, were the answer to the energy crisis. In 1999 he formed Save the Mountain, a successful mass movement that prevented the construction of a large and inappropriate housing development on the Mount Holyoke Range. In 2004, he launched the Business Ethics Pledge, an international campaign to prevent future Enron and Madoff scandals. In 2010, he organized the International Association of Green Marketers, a green marketing trade association, but let the project drop when too few people were interested.

Personal life

He is married to novelist D. Dina Friedman and is father of Alana and Rafael Horowitz Friedman. He lives in a solarized 1743 antique farmhouse in Hadley, Massachusetts.