Thank you so much to everyone who joined us at one of the She is Sustainable spring gatherings in March!
It was wonderful to be part of your conversations about guilt and joy, finding the right boundaries to protect our own energy for what we care about, and whether we should be 'nice' to people who still don't get it, or who are spilling over with new-found enthusiasm.
More priority given to care and caring? Collective action for individual good? Cities designed to enable us to be good neighbours? Or inequalities made worse by stark divisions between the people who can work from home and those who can't? She is Still (virtually) Sustainable brought together a brilliant panel to explore what the future of sustainability looks like, from our vantage point within a pandemic and a lockdown.
When I first met with Brigid Finlayson and Carolina Karlstrom, to see whether we could work together to create the first She is Still Sustainable, we talked a lot about the kind of event we wanted to make it. And our conversation focused a lot on mood, atmosphere, emotional tone: we wanted it to be “warm, safe, friendly event which is refreshing, inspiring and supportive”.
Lots of the women who came along to She is Still Sustainable said that the highlight was a co-coaching exercise we ran, using a solutions focus approach. People paired up and coached each other, asking positive, future-oriented questions about the sustainability work they wanted to do. The instructions are here.
She is Still Sustainable was more workshop than a conference, but we did have two speaker panel sessions. Like other She is Sustainable events that came before ours, this included a presentation on some of the facts and figures showing the systemic disadvantages women experience in the workplace.
