Our employee sustainability initiative team had our first informational open house last week where we recruited volunteers to our Green initatives.
I was excited to get people involved, but interestingly, what I learned from the event was equally as valuable as more volunteers...
In planning this open house, our founding sustainability team members not only tried to create a great event, but we tried to do it in an environmentally friendly way and told guests about it. For instance, we used as much re-usable material as possible (whiteboards, re-usable signs, laptop presentations instead of fancy posters) and advertised that we did this on purpose.
We felt it was important to "walk the walk" with our sustainability initiative particularly in the beginning. We worry a lot about our message getting diluted if we get criticized for doing things in an "unsustainable" way. If you turn people off from the beginning because you don't seem genuine, you've lost them forever.
But if we had started getting too caught up in running the open house "perfectly" sustainably, we might never have gotten the event off the ground. And it is vital for us to get out there with these events now and get more people involved. In the end, people seemed pretty open and supportive of our event.
So I learned that "walking the walk" is key, but we don't have to be perfect about it. I hope many people gave us credit for doing our best, but saw us as more real because we weren't perfectly green. Hopefully it makes being green seem more attainable -- if you don't think you have to be perfectly green right out of the gate.
It's a delicate balance - always striving to be more green while recognizing action without a perfect plan is also important to keep up momentum. Talking transparently about it helps everyone understand and buy in to the choices you make. So that's the plan for our employee green initiative and also my plan in my own personal green pursuits...
So, in the spirit of "walking the walk"and telling people about it...
For those of you who have been making changes in your life to be more sustainable this year, please let me know what you have done by commenting on my blog or writing on my facebook wall. Let other people know how you are personally striving to be more green....
