Game On! The sixth annual Green Meeting Industry Council (GMIC) Sustainable Meetings Conference, which drew over 300 participants, including 60 virtual attendees, focused on what Tamara Kennedy-Hill, executive director of the GMIC, called "total engagement."
The conference, held at the Doubletree Portland hotel in Portland, Ore., Feb. 20-23, brought together exhibitors, industry leaders, suppliers and planners for more than three days of panels, breakout sessions, interactive case studies and CSR team-building events.
The conference kicked off with GMIC President Guy Bigwood, director of sustainability for MCI Group, energizing the attendees with uplifting statistics. GMIC has grown to some 600 members in more than 30 countries, and currently has 20 chapters either up and running or in development, an increase from seven at the same time last year. There are also now 47 business members, which have helped make GMIC financially sustainable.
Retention rates, however, are disappointing and are one of the challenges facing the organization this year, according to Bigwood. Another challenge is to ramp up the organization’s visibility and reach.
"We have to mainstream sustainability—take what we’re doing in the meetings industry and take it to a whole other level," he said.
The message of mainstreaming is echoed in the philosophy of The Natural Step, a nonprofit organization founded with the vision of creating a sustainable society. Natural Step founder Dr. Karl-Henrik Robert delivered the conference’s keynote address.
Robert cited the main obstacle as reductionism—people not knowing what to do to further a sustainable existence.
"It’s more a matter of incompetence rather than bad values," he said, adding that "once the paradigm shift occurs, it goes like wildfire."
One of the main questions addressed in the "Sustainable Meetings Standards" presentation was the progress of the APEX/ASTM environmentally sustainable meeting standards—the result of an effort led by the Convention Industry Council’s Accepted Practices Exchange (APEX), the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the GMIC and ASTM International.
The standards have completed the APEX consensus process and are now being balloted through the ASTM International consensus process.
According to Lawrence Leonard, APEX program director and a session panelist, "Once the standards are released there will be a tremendous need for education in all sectors of the industry."
The meeting also focused on CSR and legacy projects, where companies make a lasting sustainable footprint in a community. Attendees participated in a CSR event produced by Run Brain Run in which teams competed to build bicycles that were presented during the event to disadvantaged children from the community.
GMIC’s homework is now to gather more case studies and share knowledge across networks, including partnerships with organizations like MPI and ASAE.
"We need critical conversation with the rest of the industry," said Paul Salinger, president-elect of the GMIC and vice president of marketing for Oracle. "Our challenge is to mainstream responsibility."
And rather than preaching to the choir he called on attendees to "create new choirs."
