The Erb Institute: A Vision Takes Root

Planting the seeds

Today, it is common for corporations to have a sustainability officer in their C-suite, but in the 90s few companies understood what the role of the private sector could and should be. Creating the Erb Institute 30 years ago was possible because of the vision, conviction, and persistence of many people, including Fred and Barbara Erb. 

Fred and Barbara’s story started when they met at a New Year’s Eve party as undergraduate students at the University of Michigan. After graduating, they married and had four kids, all while Fred helped to grow his family’s business, Erb Lumber. What began as a single lumber store with eight employees and $170,000 in sales grew over decades into a multi-state enterprise generating $300M in annual revenue. 

Fred and Barbara shared an appreciation and sense of responsibility for both the environment and the people in their community. Their son, John Erb, reflects that “both parents were, very early on, environmentalists.” 

Barbara was an avid organic gardener and Great Lakes advocate who grew up spending summers on Lake Huron. Fred also grew up appreciating the outdoors, spending his summers on month-long canoeing trips. During his free time, he watched every PBS nature and wildlife documentary available. This passion for nature inspired the way he ran his business. Ira Jaffe, Fred’s longtime advisor and friend, reflected on Fred's passion for sustainability: “Plenty of people in the lumber business would see a stand of trees, buy them, and just come in and cut them all down, with no thought to re-planting or protecting the forests,” he said. 

Fred ran Erb Lumber differently. He saw responsible stewardship of the land not as a cost of doing business, but as part of what doing business well actually meant. Fred also understood that Erb Lumber’s success was in part thanks to the many talented and hardworking employees who built the company alongside him. He invested in them as both professionals and individuals.

Erb Lumber began profit sharing with employees in 1957, 23 years before 401Ks were established. Fred loved to teach, and each year he sat down with managers across the company to explain how their efforts contributed to that year’s profits and how each employee’s share of the profit was being reinvested. That same spirit of investment extended to his employees’ physical well-being. In the 1960s, Erb Lumber offered smoking cessation resources and brought flu vaccine clinics on-site. Ira Jaffe and Frederick ErbNurturing the idea

Erb Lumber was sold in 1993, around the same time Fred and Barbara were beginning to think seriously about their philanthropic legacy. Although Fred was an environmentalist, he was also a businessman – and he saw those two things as inseparable. Ira recalls that Fred believed there was an opportunity to engage business leaders by coming up with programs where the industry could see that protecting the environment was in their best interest. 

Meanwhile, at the University of Michigan, the deans of the Business School and the School of Natural Resources, Joe White and Garry Brewer, were launching the Corporate Environmental Management Program (CEMP), a joint initiative between the two schools. In 1991, Ira orchestrated an introduction between Joe White and Fred and Barbara, however, the relationship needed more time to take root. “It took another five years before did say yes,” Ira recalls. “The nature of his personality was such that he loved to get people to work on a project and then be the one who came in and critiqued it. And he took great pride in making those things better,” says Ira.  

“Joe and Garry came back with the proposal to really bolster the CEMP program,” John says. “They met with my dad, along with some students. That’s what really got my parents excited. It showed how the CEMP was not only rigorous but also one-of-a-kind, thanks to the innovative capacity and entrepreneurial soul at the university.” 

Along with Joe and Garry, John also credits Laura Rubin for helping to design the program. “I consider her the first Erb grad,” he says. “She was the first one who went out, talked to the deans, and did it.” 

In 1996, five years after their first meeting, the CEMP initiative became the Frederick A. and Barbara M. Erb Environmental Management Institute. 

Bearing fruit for 30 years

After the formation of the Institute, Fred and Barbara would meet with Erb students at least twice a year. Barbara especially loved hearing about what students were working on and what they were passionate about. Fred shared that enthusiasm in his own way, keeping close tabs on where graduates were landing and bragging about their careers.

“They were so proud of the students and what they were accomplishing,” John says. “And they took a lot of pride that it was the Erb Institute at the University of Michigan.” 

In 1996, seven students graduated from the Erb Institute, and at the time, they were some of the first students to step into professional roles focused on sustainability. “It was in the early days when corporations were starting to have officers who were in charge of their environmental compliance,” Ira says.

Thirty years later, nearly 900 MBA/MS students and Undergraduate Fellows have passed through the Erb Institute. The school’s network spans across various industries and sectors around the world, and to this day, the curriculum equips students with both the business acumen to move markets and the systems-based understanding needed to drive meaningful, lasting environmental, social, and economic progress.

"Our parents had a gift for seeing possibilities where others saw obstacles,” says Leslie Erb Liedtke. “They saw environmental responsibility and business success as two sides of the same coin long before the rest of the world caught up. The Erb Institute is their legacy, and every graduate who goes out and changes the way business is done keeps that legacy alive."

This post is part of Erb’s 30th Anniversary series, celebrating three decades of impact at the intersection of business and sustainability.