Cooperation Equals Power. That was the message Elliot saw scrawled on the wall of the electric power plant he saw each day on his way to school, when he was growing up in the Amalgamated housing cooperative in the Bronx. “Being a cooperative human being is just built into my DNA,” he says. “So when I went into business, I did it with sustainability and social responsibility in mind.” He cofounded his company, Just Desserts, with his wife in 1974, and led it into a sustainable future, establishing himself as one of the pioneers of the sustainable business movement at a time when few were thinking within this framework. In 2013, he founded REV, an enterprise that helps small and midsize companies transition to a more just and sustainable way of operating. “We want to destroy the myth that sustainability is a cost. If I can show companies that they can do good for the environment and keep money in their pockets through the process, we can have them picking up the slack they should have picked up decades ago, on a large scale.”