Reflections on YSW23!

Hello Dear Reader

It's the moment you've all been waiting with bated breath for! Lol jokes... but seriously I wanted to be able to write a reflective piece this week to share with you my own thoughts and reflections on YSW23 and what you have shared in your feedback too! Sorry it's long... I have a lot of thoughts and you do too!

TL;DR: YSW23 was great, there's some improvements to make as you're expect and YSF Dates for your diary are 10th - 21st June 2024!

Before the event...

I don't know what I was expecting when I first announced YSW23, but the pre-event experience was such an emotional rollercoaster. It was confirmed to me that 99.9% of people are so kind, generous and committed to building a green future when you ask for support. There is no way in hell we could have done what we did without the support of a whole community backing us! Many of you kindly introduced me to people, shared our story with your connections and backed us financially through sponsorship and ticket sales. The demand across Yorkshire for events that support our sustainability professionals is definitely there!

We learnt a lot in the pre-event campaign about what we would do again and what we would do differently next time. I'll share more on this below...

At the event...

We opened YSW23 with our start ups in mind, with Pitch it Green - an opportunity for sustainability start ups to get in front of investors and advisors. I'm thrilled to say that there were two fantastic winners of best pitch and most investible business - Birl and Envirogood - who won access to the 谷歌 Start Ups for Sustainable Development Programme which started earlier this week! A massive thank you to the efforts of AD:VENTURE for supporting us as our Sponsor and to NorthInvest for partnering with us to deliver the event!

I think there's a lot more we can do to support our sustainability start up community in 2024, so we'll be integrating more start-up focused content into the conference, including discounted tickets specifically for start ups. Watch this space for more details!

We then hosted our Embrace Equity event on Monday afternoon with speeches from the brilliant Tracy Brabin, Mayor of West Yorkshire , Anita Frost and Women in Sustainability Network founder Rhian Sherrington FRSA, Founder / Head Coach who each spoke passionately and honestly about the role of women in sustainability. I thought it was v powerful and lots of others have shared similar feedback with me. This event was such a great one to run and I'm hoping in the new year we'll get to host regular gatherings of a similar ilk - if demand is there? You tell me! A huge thank you to our amazing sponsors thevaluecircle who I know are keen to continue to support this community of women in sustainable leadership going forward!

Skipping over the conference for a minute (I promise I'll come back to it), our Secret Business Lunch, hosted at Tattu was a brilliant afternoon of networking, connecting and enjoying a glass or two. This then led seamlessly into our Big Green Gathering at The Alchemist in the evening where all the fun carried on. You can expect this day to return and expand next year! Shout out to our amazing sponsors for The Secret Business Lunch, Axiologik and Beyondly and to the brilliant Quorn Foods for sponsoring the BGG!

Onto the Conference...

Our conference was hosted in the fabulous Cloth Hall Court, a 英国利兹大学 venue which I absolutely love working in. You can expect us to return there next year as we've just literally confirmed the dates this week - SAVE THE DATE: 18-19 June 2024!

Day one of our conference was all about nature, food, fashion, tech, healthcare and 'going green'. We heard from incredible keynote speakers such as Clover Hogan and Areeba Hamid from Greenpeace as well as many other brill keynotes and various fabulous panels focused on everything from 'Taking a deep-dive into the tech scene in Yorkshire' and 'How can my Business contribute to a better future?' and much more in between!! (you can see the old agenda on our website - we haven't got round to relaunching for 2024 just yet!)

One of the things I felt about day one was that it wasn't as cohesively tied topics-wise as day 2 was, and this reflected in the ticket sales and demand on talks on the day. So there will be some change to the agenda next year, and some topics may have a heavier focus, where some may not. We want to make sure we get this right so we're not rushing into decisions on this and we're taking advice from various members of our community. Feel free to share your thoughts here.

Day 2 was all about construction, energy, waste, water, transport and economy and finance, with a little bit of manufacturing too. There was loads to talk about within this day and a lot for us to develop out topics wise for 2024! We heard from phenomenal speakers such as John Elkington , Prof. Wayne Visser and many many more and covered topics such as "Powering the path to a Net Zero Energy Future" and "Leading the way in the Built Environment".

One comment I kept hearing from attendees in the corporate world was 'I'm just so happy we have an event like this outside of London!'.

Many of you have commented on there being so much choice and missing out on sessions because it competed with something else. A nice challenge to have - we're going to try this next time, and see if it works better: when there's a keynote on, there'll be nothing competing with it. This does mean there may be slightly fewer keynotes but I promise they will be some of the best speakers you'll ever want to see!

A huge thank you here to our conference sponsors and partners 安永 , Biffa , Severfield , Surplus Group , Pegasus Zero , Force of Nature , Sustainability Partnerships , WRM , boxxe , Alrose Productions , The Better Business Network , Imageco and First Frame

Many of you feel very strongly about the choice we made not to serve lunch at the conference this year. We chose not to include lunch at this years event as frankly we didn't know how many people were coming until quite literally the week before (more on that below), and we didn't want to create unnecessary food waste. Next year this will be easier to manage as we've now got an established audience and we should be able to have catering in place!

We had arranged with some local restaurants to host a deal but we ran into a problem when they closed on the Tuesday for a team gathering which they didn't tell us about! Someone has gone as far in their feedback to say that they think this was an attempt by the venues involved to greenwash... I don't think it was that, I think it was more likely that the person who arranged the team gathering wasn't the person we worked with on the deal, and probably didn't know about the deal in place. Let's look for the best in each other, shall we?

There's a real divide when it comes to pricing feedback... some of you have shared how you felt that the calibre of speakers and attendees made the cost of a ticket value for money when compared with like-for-like events in London, Bristol and other locations across the country (where tickets are as much as ￡1500+VAT!!) and others have complained that it felt spenny for a small business.

I have a few things to say here... events cost a lot of money to run, especially high calibre events with international speakers, so this isn't me promising that our events are going to get any cheaper. We will always have a pay-it-forward campaign in place which will allow anyone who feels that price is a barrier to entry to apply for a ticket - I actively encourage you to use it! We are going to have staggered pricing for tickets for 2024, a set price for start ups, SMEs and Corporates, that kind of thing, and we will be increasing the price as we get closer to the event, as I know that this works for others and will help us to better manage our capacities within the venue (see there's this annoying post-covid hangover thing where most people book tickets to attend events about 2 weeks out, it's actually a major problem for organisers trying to... well, organise things like lunch!). We will also have early bird tickets available which will be discounted, just as we did this year! So my advice to you is to get in early if you want the best price.

Keeping to our promises...

In keeping with our own sustainability commitments, we are still in the process of measuring the carbon footprint from the event - I'm hoping we'll be able to share this info with you soon but it's taking a bit of time! Once it is clear, we will be working with the brilliant team at Make It Wild to offset our carbon locally.

As I hope you will remember, we didn't just measure our carbon footprint, but we actively looked to reduce it from our planning, including being vegan-led throughout the week, keeping 20% of our tickets back for our pay-it-forward scheme and using suppliers and partners who use recycled and recyclable materials! We'll be extending these efforts in 2024.

Speaking of which, I was so so proud of our main stage artwork which will be a legacy piece, returning in a new guise in 2024:

We worked hard to ensure that the event was diverse and inclusive , representing the voice of many and many of you have complimented our efforts to get young people represented at the event - lots of compliments need to go to ?? Lella Violet Halloum FRSA, MBCS who worked hard on this as our Youth Ambassador!

When it comes to gender and ethnicity within our speaker line up, the event was almost representative of the UK as a whole, with work to do to make it representative of Yorkshire:

• Gender breakdown: 52% women, 48% men
• Ethnicity breakdown: 82% white, 18% BAME

Although this seems massively weighted, the UK consensus from 2021 shows that the UK population is 81% white, 19% BAME which means it is very close to representative of the UK as a whole. In Yorkshire this split is 76% white 24% BAME. Our goal for 2024 will be to continue this work and make the event representative of Yorkshire!

Speaking of which...

Location!

Leeds was a great central location for year one of our core events and we really felt like the West Yorkshire region got behind the event. Leeds City Council , West Yorkshire Combined Authority , 英国利兹大学 and Yorkshire & Humber Climate Commission backing us as headline sponsors/partners and rallying behind our campaign to grow the green economy were real highlights of building this special event.

We had some push back from certain voices in the region not as happy to get involved (Sheffield, I'm looking at you!) because we'd chosen Leeds as our location for a Yorkshire Sustainability Week. If I'm being honest, I think you're being a bit harsh on us for a first time event, but but but I hear ya! We're coming... and not just to Sheffield!

ICYMI

Yorkshire Sustainability Week will become Yorkshire Sustainability Festival 2024! The dates are now confirmed as 10th - 21st June 2024 - get them in your diary please :D! This allows us to spread the event over 2 weeks, and unbound by the constraints of a week, this means we'll be in Hull, York and Sheffield the week before the conference, with satilite events!

If you're based in any of these cities (or other cities you'd like us to come to!) then do drop me a DM, I'd love to chat about how you can get involved in our plans!

All things Fringe

We had 15 fringe events take place in year one, which was brilliant! We'd like to extend our fringe programme in year two, and I hope that many of you will want to be a part of our fringe line up as well as part of our core events! If you'd like to be part of our fringe programme in 2024, you'll be able to submit your event in January, when we'll launch our new YSF24 website!

Anybody can run a fringe event and we actively encourage you to bring your perspective to our festival! Events are a great tool for networking with likeminded professionals, creating new business opportunities and growing the green economy!

Closing statement

I've written academic essays that are shorter than this newsletter, so I will end by saying, I think we started the process of building an event that can really support our sustainability colleagues, and those who are sustainability curious.?

There is work to do, as always, but I am proud of what we built in 8 short months, of the efforts put in by all my fabulous team who worked their backsides off to bring this to life and I hope that the 99.9% of you who I know have our back will continue to be as kind, supportive and passionate in your support for us as we continue to grow this event, remembering of course that at the heart of this, we're all people trying to do the right thing, in our own way, to make the future we're building a better place for people and our beautiful planet.

If you got this far, you're a saint! Thanks for reading, supporting and playing a part in creating a sustainable future!