It was to have been a two-day face to face event for 45 women who work in sustainability, with peer coaching, group cheers, a wall of achievement, keynote speakers and open space sessions. What on earth could we do instead? She is Still (virtually) Sustainable, of course!

We weren't aiming to replace the face to face event, which we still hope to run if and when circumstances permit. So our online sessions were an interim offer to the women who'd bought tickets.

She is Still Sustainable (SiSS) is run on love and a shoe-string by volunteers. We had to plan to use platforms we had access to and were already familiar enough with - in this case, that meant Zoom. So the first thing we did was to revisit our aims. There was no way we'd be able to cover everything and we thought people wouldn't want longer than 90 minutes online. We decided to focus on two things, in two separate sessions: the well-being of our participants, and a discussion about sustainability in light of our collective experience of pandemic and lockdown.

Our wonderful panel of speakers responded positively to our suggestion to take things online, so we knew we had some great content and willing contributors. The two sessions ran on the same days as the original event, but we put them both in the morning as we thought that would work best. We sent out some slides in advance to participants, to walk them through some of Zoom's features ahead of the sessions. I'm not sure we'd need to do that now, a month later!

Well-being

Monday's well-being session had three 'team' members: Liz Rivers, our lovely coach and leadership expert; Lynne Ceeney, part of the SiSS team chairing the session, and me as the technical host (or 'producer' as this role is known). With one guest 'speaker', the session was able to be very interactive and intuitive. Liz led us through a guided visualisation and offered some frameworks for reflecting on lockdown. We made full use of Zoom's breakout rooms to give people a chance to share experiences and how they were feeling. The parallel written 'chat' thread was full of introductions, people saying 'hi' to each other, and also the feedback from breakout groups. Later in the session, people shared links to resources. We had some slides for things like ground rules, which we shared by 'screen sharing'. That's how we planned to show a video too.

When the video we were playing went wrong, Liz stepped in with a mindfulness exercise while we worked behind the scenes to fix the problem.

Sustainability Futures

Tuesday's session on the future of sustainability was very different. Our panel (Farhana Yamin, Dr Susan Buckingham, Zoe Le Grand and Solitaire Townsend) each gave a few minutes wisdom on 'what we should be doing now', and breakout groups discussed what changes everyone was seeing in their own organisation's (or clients') focus on sustainability. Feedback from those groups was via the chat thread, with a bit of spoken conversation around it. A second panel conversation looked at strategic, system level change as we emerge from (or get used to) the current situation. We used polls (one of Zoom's features) to test how optimistic people are about what the future holds, and how empowered they feel to contribute.

From the SiSS team, Dr Alina Congreve chaired the session, I was the tech host, and we also had Kerry North monitoring the chat and looking out for 'raised hands' - more important in this session where there was plenary discussion but not much time for it.

And we took a SiSS Selfie!

We also observed the silence at 11.00, for key workers who have died as a result of COVID-19. It was very moving to observe it as a group, even if we were all in different places.

There were a lot of 'moving parts' in these sessions, and we really benefited from having dress rehearsals and technical run-throughs, time-consuming though these were. We also had back channels for the team, so we could communicate outside of Zoom. These were really useful, especially when we had a glitch with sound at one point.

We still want to bring everyone together face to face at some point, but while that isn't possible, we can enjoy learning together about how to meet virtually.

Summary tips

Clear aims for the session or event.
Clear ground rules for participants.
Understand and use the features of the platform you're working on.
Team roles including facilitator/chair, technical host/producer, monitor.
Dress rehearsals and technical run-throughs.

Making the Path by Walking

This post was first published in Making the Path by Walking, May 2020. To subscribe, scroll right down.