Holly Harlan

Founder and President | holly@e4s.org

Holly Harlan, an entrepreneur, engineer, and economic and business development specialist for 30 years, works with entrepreneurial leaders from business, government and non-profit organizations to implement sustainable business strategies that drive new opportunities and triple bottom line benefits for their organizations and the region. From the beginning of her career as an engineer with GE and John Deere, she has been trained as a change agent. Today she helps leaders discover the changes that will enhance their business’s ability to discover and implement new opportunities to thrive through the lens of sustainability and whole-systems design.

If Economic Development was a law firm in Northeast Ohio, Holly would surely be a senior partner. After graduating with a BS in Industrial Engineering, Holly worked 8 years in manufacturing and marketing for John Deere and GE, often in start-up operations. In 1990 she worked for three nationally recognized economic development: CAMP(now Magnet), Shorebank Cleveland, and WIRE-Net. Holly has listened, learned, experimented and discovered new opportunities to help the new and existing businesses prosper.

In 2000 Holly founded the Entrepreneurs for Sustainability (E4S), an award winning economic development non-profit whose mission is to grow sustainable regional economies that affirm and sustain life for all. Holly Harlan and E4S are nationally recognized as network-builders, subject-matter experts, and project catalysts in the sustainable business world.  The E4S Connect, Learn, Do Sustainability strategy has resulted in a growing network of over 8000 entrepreneurial leaders from all sectors who are putting sustainability to work for their organizations and the NEO region.

In 2005 Holly was awarded the SBC Foundation Civic Entrepreneur Award by REI at CASE, in 2007 E4S was awarded the Organizational Innovation Award, in 2008 Cleveland Magazine recognized her as one of 50 Influentials in Cleveland and in 2009 Crain’s Cleveland Business awarded Holly the Green Lantern Award.