ReThink Resilience Summit 2017

Project description

ReThink has held an annual Resilience Summit for two years, and both times our organization was lucky enough to work with CSF through partnerships and grants. This year the Summit focuses on incentives that a range of organizations experience, as we all face the need for climate action and improved resilience. This event is modeled after the Resilience Challenge hosted by Sustainable Seattle in the fall of 2014 and 2015. This year it will be held in Maple Hall’s Area 01 to encourage maximum attendance. We are teaming up with several clubs from across campus to draw an eclectic crowd of around 30-50 students. These students will spend 4 hours listening to in-depth presentations from our business professionals, engaging in question and answer sessions, discussing relevant topics in breakout sessions, and ending with individualized plans of action that may simply consist of a changed mindset, or even turn into future CSF proposals. With time for networking over tables of information from on-and-off campus partners, and lunch of sustainable, local food, we hope our audience will come away with a diverse set of perspectives and go forth driving change in business-as-usual practices. Beyond the experience members of the planning committee will gain from organizing and marketing this event, all participants of the Resilience Summit will get exposure to a diverse array of students from other disciplines, and informative and inspiring presentations and discussions from professionals in their fields of work. It is a fantastic opportunity for students to broaden their perspectives from the more narrow views represented in their respective majors.

A large part of the challenge is bringing students together to find the root cause of UW’s environmental issues in order to create a feasible solution including a plan of action. The 30-50 students attending the event are expected to be engaged and thoughtful members of the audience. Action post-event is not required, but will be highly encouraged and enabled by our team. We have invited speakers from Alaska Airlines, Forterra, Northwest Sustainable Energy for Economic Development (SEED), Threshold Investing Group, and Sustainable Business Consulting to speak about how their experiences, company, and/or mission approaches the concept of incentives in terms of climate action. For example: “Why does your organization choose to prioritize social and environmental initiatives and how are those goals achieved? How have you and your company reimagined traditional market structures to benefit the environment and what actions would you recommend others take to emulate your steps or drive their own sustainable path forward?”. We are expecting to obtain funds from the Foster Community Fund to help us support this event as it directly affects many students within the Foster School.

The monetary support of the CSF grant will enable us to perform the best possible outreach for the UW Resilience Summit in various relevant areas on campus in order to gain excitement and attendance that outweighs last year’s event.  Keeping our environment and UW’s paper reduction goals in mind, while still maximizing the potential for outreach to many attendees, we are planning to partially utilize ReThink grant money to create less than 20 eye-catching and aesthetically appealing posters that will illustrate the importance and quality of this event. ReThink has identified the most influential locations on campus that identify with the goals of this event and ReThink. These include, but are not limited to, the Foster School of Business, the Art and Design School, College of the Environment, Gould Hall, and the Paul G. Allen Center of Computer Science. The posters will be displayed in high-traffic areas, such as cafes and main entrances in order to attract the most attention. These posters complement our mainly digital marketing plan through our well known Facebook page, event page and targeted outreach of our board members and faculty contacts. Our multi-faceted marketing approach will maximize our outreach, and ensure that our environmental message will be heard loud and clear throughout campus.

The environmental problem that we hope to combat with this event is the same we’ve been working to oust for years previously: the widespread lack of education on pressing global environmental issues that UW students are broadly receiving. These issues apply to every student on campus in almost every academic discipline, yet not all students are required—or have room in their schedules—to take courses that touch on these issues, and independently sought information can often be misleading. Furthermore, though the University of Washington has undertaken many steps to be a sustainable campus, there is so much more that can be done, and we believe this starts with student education, involvement, and most importantly interest. The Resilience Summit thoroughly aligns with UW’s mission to sustainability. Even with such a broad term and definition, ReThink unites itself in all parts of all definitions in order to fully capture the meaning as it applies to business, industry, government, and individuals. ReThink is widely known across campus because of our work with the UW Sustainability Office, UW Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship, and other environmental clubs around campus. We look forward to bringing this unique event to students from diverse educational backgrounds and hope to foster a learning environment where even our guest speakers can learn from others at this event.

Timeline

February 1- May 1 | Planning

• Brainstorming
  • Partnerships
  • Funding Opportunities
• Obtaining speaker confirmations
• Creating marketing campaign
• Gaining funding from CSF and FCF

April 14-28 | Implementing

• Implementing Marketing → Outreach
  • Online first
  • Then to print and around campus
  • Start outreach to organizations, listservs

April 20- May 8 | Outreach

• Earth Day Tabling
• Sharing the Resilience Summit at other events
• Sharing event opportunity in classes
• Posting our small marketing posters around campus

May 8-May 19 | Final Stage

• Final marketing push
• Extreme outreach
• Finalization of details with all speakers and partners

Budget