Beginning with a one-toddler action against smoking at his parents’ party at about age three, Shel has been involved in environmental and social change movements his whole life. At age 15, he was involved in a community group that opposed a nuclear power plant proposed for two miles north of New York City (a proposal the utility company quickly withdrew).

On the marketing side, Shel was still a teenager when he started doing publicity and marketing for grass-roots community organizations with zero promotional budget. These groups had no funds to buy stamps, so he used to hand-deliver press releases on a three-speed bicycle. When he turned his attention to business, he brought a fresh approach steeped in his activism.

Training as a journalist in college, Shel was active in several campus and community groups. He first became aware of the power of the news media when the local newspaper refused to print meeting notices he wrote for a controversial group—but gave extensive news coverage to its refusal. Now, for over twenty years, he’s helped businesses, nonprofits, and community groups get their message out to the public affordably and effectively.

After finishing Antioch College at age 19, Shel had to come to terms with his own work history: career paths not only in writing and marketing/PR, but also in radio, teaching, arts, food service, office systems, community organizing, and environmental issues. Putting together his own first résumés led to a new career direction: résumé writing and career services. Shel quickly realized he had the ability to discover a job candidate’s best strengths and highlight them while downplaying weaknesses. In short, he turned résumé writing into a marketing function.

A native of New York City, he returned there to work at two literary agencies as a manuscript reader, and then worked for a year and a half as a VISTA Volunteer community organizer with the Gray Panthers. Shel’s first book, written when he was only 22, was about why nuclear power makes no sense. He’s also done eight books on marketing and one on having fun cheaply.

Pursuing poetry on the side, he became very active in the New York open poetry scene, and met Dina Friedman at a reading in Greenwich Village. The two left New York in 1980, spending an academic year in Philadelphia at a training program for community organizers before settling in Western Massachusetts in 1981 and starting a writing and teaching business. They married two years later. Their first child, Alana, was born in 1987 and younger child Rafael followed in 1992.

Drawing on the marketing he’d practiced in and after college, Shel began marketing his own business locally, and grew it to the largest of its kind in a three-county service area. Gradually, he expanded his practice beyond résumés to marketing for other businesses and nonprofits, and then to consulting on incorporating social and environmental change at a profit. He began using e-mail as a marketing tool in 1994, set up his first website in 1996, and quickly developed a reputation internationally as a skilled marketing strategist and copywriter who knows how to stretch a marketing dollar. He’s helped clients and mentees in Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa, and North America; his books (eight on marketing, ten total) have sold to dozens of countries, and have been republished in South Korea, Japan, India, Mexico, Italy, and Turkey.

As a life-long activist and marketer, Shel brought marketing savvy to many environmental and social justice change organizations. In 1999, he founded Save the Mountain, which mobilized thousands of people (in a town of 5000) and rapidly beat back an “unstoppable” poorly-planned development on a mountain abutting a state park.

Following the success of this campaign, Shel began to look at a bigger canvas: How to convince bottom-line-driven business that building in social and environmental change could be profitable. After bringing marketing into this environmental campaign, he started looking at what lessons he could bring into business from the activist world.

The deeper Shel dived into it, the more he saw the connections between these two worlds. His research kept showing that businesses with a higher purpose and strong ethics could do very well in the marketplace. And his consulting kept unearthing big opportunities for companies willing to uphold those values.

He discovered that more and more consumers insist on environmental responsibility—otherwise, no sale! Not only that, they want businesses to go beyond just being green. They want to do business with companies that are doing something about issues like hunger…poverty…racism…war…catastrophic climate change…

His 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (his second co-authorship with the late “Father of Guerrilla Marketing,” Jay Conrad Levinson), was published by Morgan James, and hit two different category best-seller lists in its first two weeks.

In the book, Horowitz and Levinson provide dozens of examples of companies large and small that have succeeded by putting people and planet first: from Fortune 100 firms like Southwest Airlines and Procter & Gamble to smaller but well-known companies like Patagonia, Stonyfield, and Marcal, down to small local businesses and even solopreneurs.