Sustainable Pulse Profile: Ralph Valatka

Like many of their fellow citizens, Ralph Valatka and his wife, Jordyce Bryncesen, were originally drawn to Door County by its lakefront.

“I’ve always loved living on big water, and we got this unheard-of opportunity to rent a full-time, year-round cabin on Lake Michigan, so we took it,” Valatka says. Since seizing that opportunity, Valatka has spent much of his time running Shady Nook Creative, a creative services firm that helps organizations (mostly nonprofits) advertise and promote themselves. Lately, he finds himself serving primarily environmental nonprofits – organizations dedicated to saving the very natural beauty that drew him to the peninsula in the first place.

Ralph Valatka

Valatka, who spent much of his early life working in the entertainment industry, has always been interested in environmental issues.

“I never was a big activist about it, but in my twenties, which was around the time of Woodstock, we were all into the idea that pollution was killing the world and we were sounding the alarm as best we could.”

But as his business has pushed him further into the world of environmental activism, Valatka has grown more personally invested in green issues.

“The area that we’re most attentive in is conservation – probably the single most important thing people can do for world,” he says. “Sustainable living, that’s the first concern.”

But Valatka is able to have an even wider impact on environmental issues through his role as a consultant to such organizations as the Door County Environmental Council, the Door County Renewable Energy Task Force, Community Wind Energy of Door County, and the Partnership for Phosphate Reduction. Valatka, who describes himself as “a marketing consultant who can help people develop businesses through creative means,” works to help these clients increase their visibility and public communications.

From his years of work as an organizational consultant, Valatka has developed his own perspective on organized environmental activism in Door County. He cites a high concentration of nonprofits and an impending population decrease in the county as unique challenges that his green-leaning clients will face in the coming years.

“There are 105 nonprofits on the peninsula,” Valatka explains. “Funders have to make decisions between us for limited numbers of funds, and that means that anybody in nonprofit sector has to define their mission and needs very precisely.”

Valatka’s top piece of advice to organizations trying to effect environmental change in Door County is about self-analysis.

“Don’t assume anything,” he says. “In Door County, you’re looking at several different market types; try to learn what the market thinks about you as best you can.”

The only drawback to his job, Valatka says, is that sometimes progress seems to move at “a glacial speed.”

“But,” he adds, “I feel real good about working with people who are dedicated to what they’re doing, and dedicated to helping (on a micro level) our peninsula and (on a macro level) the world.”