MICEBOOK - POWER 50 GREEN CHAMPIONS COVER 1 - Flipbook - Page 7
Page 7
Carina Filek
Carina Jandt
Global COO, Elevate
Director, Event Cycle
When Carina Filek, COO of global event
staffing business Elevate, embarked on
driving the company’s environmental
action plan, Elevating Purpose, she was
determined to leverage their 40,000+
staff around the world to drive impact.
The primary challenges were to foster a
culture of sustainability, influence
behaviour changes, and educate and
mobilise the workforce to deliver
sustainable behaviours whilst working at
events.
After being made redundant during Covid,
Carina had a conversation with an old
colleague from George P. Johnson,
Chantal Kerr-Sheppard about all the
knowledge that had been lost with the
layoffs. The knowledge wasn’t just of
processes and services but of products,
materials and assets used by clients of
the event agencies, typically stored at
various warehouses and suppliers all over
the county.
To instil a strong culture of action and
accountability, she launched the
#ElevatingPeople training program,
which equips the workforce with
knowledge and skills to implement
sustainable practices, ensuring
sustainability becomes ingrained in
operations. Elevating Purpose was
integrated into the company’s personnel
objectives and staff are financially
incentivised to achieve their purpose
objectives.
To track progress and drive
improvements, Carina established KPIs.
These include educating 100% of event
staff on low-carbon travel options,
tracking business travel and event staff
commutes, measuring Scope 1, 2, and 3
greenhouse gas emissions to establish a
baseline and reduction roadmap to Net
Zero, and implementing waste reduction
and recycling training for all staff.
Embracing sustainable sourcing Elevate
has gone the extra mile to curate a list of
preferred suppliers for its team.
The distance staff travel has notably
reduced since the launch of Elevating
Purpose, and car travel has also reduced
with public transportation, cycling and
walking now accounting for over 50% of
the method field staff use to travel to
work. The company has also embarked
on a tree-planting initiative with
TreeNation, planting 758 trees to date,
contributing to the capture of 293 tonnes
of CO2.
Elevate has become a preferred network
supplier for multiple clients where CSR is
a primary concern, with Momentum most
recently awarding Elevate PSL status,
secured the EcoVadis Silver accreditation
in France and won ESG Program of the
Year at the UK Company Culture Awards.
With events coming to a halt, agencies
and suppliers shutting down left right and
centre, the worry was that a lot of this
incredibly useful “stuff” was going to go to
waste. And after searching the internet,
there didn’t seem to be a solution for the
variety of items on offer. Hence Event
Cycle was born, to transform surplus
materials from the events industry into
donations for charitable organisations
community groups, social enterprises, and
schools.
By setting up with sustainability and social
impact in mind, this has led to the
business being built consciously,
considering both of these in every
decision, from what notebooks (locally
produced from repurposed packaging)
and birthday cards (Washed up Thames
plastic waste cards) they buy to transport,
(HVO Biofuel only when booking trucks
where they cannot find an electric or
person powered vehicle in the first place).
All travel, personal and business is offset.
Event Cycle now works with major event
agencies including Amplify, Brandfuel,
Brands at Work, Bray Leino, Cheerful
Twentyfirst, Identity, Jack Morton,
Momentum, and Smyle, and clients
including the BBC, McLaren, Veuve
Clicquot and Which?
Their most notable work has been with
COP26 and last summer’s 2022
Birmingham Commonwealth Games. As
part of their work donating items to
charities and community groups, they
have prevented over £1.5 million worth of
leftover event materials going to waste
and saved 61.54 tonnes CO2e from items
not going to landfill.
Chantal Kerr-Sheppard
Director, Event Cycle
From growing up in a house where make
do and mend, and recycle and repurpose
were part of life, volunteering for all her
adult life and working in one of the most
wasteful industries that exist, Chantal has
been gently nudged throughout her life
towards the sustainable and socially
impactful solution that has transpired to
be Event Cycle.
Chantal set up Event Cycle, an initiative
that transforms surplus materials from the
events industry into donations for
charitable organisations and community
groups, with a former colleague and fellow
Power 50 Green Champion Carina Jandt.
After coming up with the idea in August
2020, the pair funded and built the website
themselves on Wix, developed processes
for internal systems and launched in
January 2021.
They grew the business using their
combined networks of contacts on both
the event agency and charity side, making
sure to keep sustainability and social
impact in mind every step of the way. Lee
Cuffe who worked at Firecracker at the
time was among the first to support the
initiative and use Event Cycle to donate
lots of materials they had been keeping in
the hope they would one day become
useful, providing an incredible test case
and proof of concept to showcase to the
event industry.
Event Cycle now works with many
agencies and brands including
Firecracker, TRO, Owl Live, xyz, BBC, and
Veuve Clicquot to name a few, and has
prevented over £1.5 million worth of
leftover event materials going to waste,
saving 161.54t tCO2e from items not going
to landfill and helping over 500 charities,
community groups, social enterprises and
schools in the process. The legacy of these
donations will be seen for years to come
especially for projects such as the BYSA
community centre after the Birmingham
2022 Commonwealth Games donations.
