Today's guest tells me about her journey from being a professional photographer following Formula One across the world until she decided to give it up and concentrate on promoting sustainability.
If you work hard on making your organisation sustainable, isn't it nice to be recognised?
Anthony:
Today I welcome Karen Sutton, who is the founder of the Global Good Awards. She's going to talk to us about them, and also about the Purpose Summit, which is coming up in London.
Karen, welcome to the sustainable futures report.
Before you started your work with the Global Good Awards, and before you started developing sustainable events, you were a professional photographer for some years, I believe, and you worked for big brands all over the world.
Karen:
I did. I started my career, doing GCSE photography and loved it. Straight out of college, I went and found a work experience placement that then gave me a job. I trained as a photographer in Formula One, so at the age of 19 I was travelling around the world camera in hand, photographing Formula One. Some of our clients, I'm slightly shameful of now, were tobacco and oil and gas companies, which is a bit of a far cry from what I believe in now.
Anthony:
So, what brought about your change of heart?
Karen:
It wasn't really a change of heart: My boss at the time had been working in Formula One for 30 years, and he was on the verge of retiring from a very heavy, living out of a suitcase eight months of the year, career. I'd only done it for three years and I wasn't really in a position to be able to carry on looking after those clients, because Formula One photography is a pretty high-end skill.
So, he sort of retired and I sort of followed him for a few years running a digital media lab. I was photographing in the mid-90s with film, so we had to get everything absolutely pin sharp and perfectly exposed, and we'd spend a good 24 hours processing everything and making selections. It was the old old days!
So, I followed him into a digital media lab, ran that for a few years, but the white walls were closing in on me and I needed to get out.
I dabbled in a few other things for a while; I set up a marketing agency and I still sort of have that going in the background, which is a good tool to have to run the awards. But then I kind of fell into the awards in a way. Within my marketing agency, I set up a little community group called Business at Brooklands - I was in an office in the middle of Weybridge - where Mercedes Benz World and the old Brooklands Museum is - and I set up this little group of businesses that came together every quarter to network and support the local community. One day somebody from one of the larger businesses asked me, ‘have you ever thought about rewarding organisations for what they're doing in their community?’ I had but I thought it would be too small to do in Surrey. But then it started beavering away in my head and six months later, the concept of the awards started, and I initially named them The National CSR Awards, and it was only in the UK.
Anthony:
So is it now international then?
Karen
It is, yes. We changed our name in 2018. Pretty much immediately after I launched it, I knew that CSR was not the right term to use anymore. It was one rather drunken night with a few of our other fellow judges, in a little floating hotel in East London called The Good Hotel, that supports ex-offenders, by employing them. We wanted it to be ‘global’ and we loved the word ‘good’. ‘Good’ was then not really used widely in many company names - it is now. So we came up with the Global Good Awards and immediately launched it as a global awards programme. So yes, it is now.
Anthony:
So, what are the criteria for somebody to receive a Global Good Award?
Karen:
We've got about 16 categories and they change occasionally according to the trends within social and environmental sustainability. But we have one very important difference with our awards to many of the others, and that is that we only reward for action. We don't reward aims, targets and roadmaps, because we don't believe that they should be rewarded. They might be great roadmaps, but you're not going to win an award for it with us until you've achieved it.
Anthony:
Right. These actions are aimed all at sustainability. Is that correct?
Karen:
Yes, but it's social and environmental sustainability. So, community partnership projects, education campaigns, social, environmental, law, they're all very much part of sustainability. A lot of people think sustainability is only about the environment, but there's a lot of crossovers.
Anthony:
Are you able to give me an example of some of the recent winners and the sort of things that they've done?
Karen:
Yes, so last year, one of one of my favourite projects was by a company called DelAgua. They were supporting people in Africa, with cooking stoves, that used tiny bits of twig, that would be dropped on the ground, so it wouldn't be cutting down trees. And they taught the women to cook in a way that reduced the air pollution to the families cooking in their huts. The stoves themselves reduced pollution by extraordinary amounts, I can't exactly remember the number, but now they've reached millions of families across parts of Africa, and it's been an incredible project. They don't just deliver the stoves and just walk away, they've got local teams on the ground, visiting the families, making sure that they're still using the stoves, and I know that they've got something like a 97% rate of people still using them. They're now reaching out into other countries, and I think they've got something like two and a half million stoves now delivered around Africa. So yeah, it's got a big social benefit. Because, you know, if kids are healthier, they can go to school. It's just created a much better environment for everybody in the villages. That's just one example. And they got silver, they didn't even get the gold! That’s just one project that stuck out for me last year.
Anthony:
I think that's the thing, though, isn't it? Of all these projects, it's creating a better environment in the broadest sense, because as you said, there's a social aspect to it, as well as the basic environmental issues.
You say it's international, what other countries are involved in applying for awards?
Karen:
We have a lot from the Middle East, Asia, not so many from Africa. About 50% is from the UK, because obviously we're an English language entry process, so sometimes there will be some language barrier. Quite a few from the US and starting to get some more from Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, all over Europe, really. So yeah, we get them from pretty much every continent.
Anthony:
Right. Now, you have an annual award ceremony, but am I right that this year, instead of having the Global Good Awards, you're going to have something which we're calling the Purpose Summit, which will take place in London in October. Tell me a bit more about that.
Karen:
I'll tell you about the summit in a minute, but the reason for the change was that I was getting rather disillusioned by selling tickets to companies that I knew hadn't won an award. Regardless of whether a small company or big company, if they're buying tickets to come to an award, we were encouraging an environmental impact by encouraging people to travel to a ceremony that really was just about having a few drinks and doing some networking. I believe that we need to move on from that, and awards in general need to move away from just having no purpose to come together for an event.
Past participants had said to me that they'd be really interested to learn more about the winners and what their projects were and how they got to where they are. So, I thought it might be an idea to split the awards into two parts. Firstly, it will be a free virtual ceremony for everybody in July, which will be streamed on YouTube and will announce the winners, which will be held on the 12th of July.
Then three months later, a pretty jam packed day of content, which will be the Purpose Summit in October. The focus on that event will be practical workshops and listen and learn panel sessions. Each of those sessions will include at least one gold winner from the most relevant category to that topic and they'll be sharing their insights about why they won, what worked, what didn't, what were their challenges and what best practices that they learned, that they can share to help other organisations make a positive change and make that faster.
Anthony:
So that'll be a face to face event, will also be available online?
Karen:
Yes, we're going to run some of the sessions - the listen and learn sessions – virtually so people around the world can join in. But we do have a no fly policy for our event. So, for speakers, and for guests, we do not allow them to fly in for our event, unless they've got a good reason to be coming to the UK already. And I believe we are the only awards that does that.
Anthony:
That's very interesting. So, you're taking a broader view than just what your award winners might be doing, by looking at the carbon footprint, if you like, of aviation and so on.
Karen:
Yep. Yes.
Anthony:
And taking a broader view, what do you feel about NetZero 2050? Are we on track? And is it a sensible target anyway?
Karen:
Um, it has to be. We can't push it any more than 2050. I think there were some scientists, I read about last week, saying about the El Nino that we have this year, has already warmed ocean temperatures. It could mean that in one or two years, we could reach that 1.5 degree of warming, which would be so much quicker than they ever imagined.
Do I think we are on track? I don't think we are no, I don't think we're doing particularly well at all. There's some great stuff happening out there, there's some brilliant startups and innovation that could really drive change really quickly, but I think politics is getting in the way. And I think policy is too slow to change.
Just take building regulations in the UK, for example. Some construction companies are really going further than they need to. But a lot aren't, houses are still being built with no renewable energy installed, on floodplains, on green belts. And those houses will need modifying very soon to meet those goals.
My local council are building another 700 homes close to me on a floodplain, on a really busy road, and they've just found a badger set, and adders - who are both two protected species - and they are going ahead with the work and the construction. That really annoys me. I've read all of the environmental reports on this particular project, and all of all the environmental side with renewable energy on the buildings, none of those houses are going to have any renewable energy sources put into them, and there's 700 of them on a floodplain. So, they might be underwater way before they need to be modified. So yeah, sorry, I'll get off my soapbox!
Anthony:
Well, how do we change policies? How do we get the governments to change policies? I mean, is the is the approach by extinction rebellion the way to do it, do you think, or what should we be doing?
Karen:
I think extinction rebellion needs to exist. If you think about it, civil disobedience got women the vote. So we can't all sit back and hope everyone else will do it. Change will only happen because of the power and the pressure of people.
The only thing I don't agree with Extinction Rebellion is, and I'm not sure it was them or if it was Insulate Britain, but blocking motorways. I had a bit of a darker view on blocking motorways because they were blocking ambulances, and I heard on the radio, somebody come on who was sitting in a traffic jam, and they said; ‘Oh, where are you going?’ He said; ‘Oh, going to insulate homes, but clearly not today!’ And they were being blocked by insulate Britain! So I thought that was quite ironic.
Anthony:
That's a splinter group, of course. But yes, we take your point.
Karen:
I do know they are having a rethink about how they go about challenging things. But generally, I've been out on a couple of on a couple of marches with them, and I've never experienced any problems, and I absolutely agree they need to exist. But like any organisation I think it needs to be carefully managed, with good PR and good communications and good management.
Anthony:
Right. Well, going back to the Global Good Awards. How many people will be applying for awards this year?
Karen:
Hundreds, they already have actually. We closed for entries two or three weeks ago and I have 42 judges beavering away online. We started with five judges back in 2015, we now have 42.
I only ever choose judges that are experienced in their particular categories, so they have the experience and knowledge within that area - net zero or campaigns or community partnerships, education, all of those - I only give them the categories that they know a lot about.
Anthony:
Well, all in all, you sound pretty optimistic. Is that fair?
Karen:
I'd say so. We've got to get there.
Anthony:
We’ve got to get there. I love to say that. Yes, that's absolutely true.
Karen, thank you very much for sharing your thoughts and ideas with the sustainable futures report.
We'll put links to both the Global Good Awards and to the Purpose Summit on the website. Those dates as well - the 12th of July and the 12th October as well.
Thanks again.
Karen:
Thank you
Thanks to Karen Sutton.
The websites you need to learn more are: https://www.purposesummit.co.uk/ and
https://globalgoodawards.co.uk/
Thank you for listening. And as always, grateful thanks to my loyal patrons.
I am being inundated with requests from people who want to be interviewed on the Sustainable Futures Report and I have to be quite ruthless about who I accept, and who I send away. I'm going to aim to get a batch of interviews done at the end of this month which means I'm probably going to have to write a commentary episode next week. Who knows what the news will be by then?
So for now, that was the Sustainable Futures Report .
I am Anthony Day.
Until next week.
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