More than ever before, the world needs changemakers who are indeed addressing social problems and finding solutions to tackle them at the roots, but who do so in a way that also protects the wellbeing of our planet. As a global community of 800+ social innovators, we are committed to embodying sustainable changemaking and finding ways of being and working that lessen the burden on our planet. This is why we have created the CXC Sustainability Manifesto, which highlights our sustainability principles and offers a series of actions we take as a community to be as sustainable and as environmentally friendly as possible.
At the core of our Sustainability Manifesto is the mantra avoid–reduce–offset.
- AVOID: Can we avoid that particular unsustainable choice?
- REDUCE: If it is not possible to avoid the unsustainable choice, can we opt for the most sustainable choice given the circumstances?
- OFFSET: If it is not possible to opt for a sustainable choice, how can we offset the negative impact of that particular unsustainable choice?
Moreover, the mantra is brought to life by strong guiding principles to support climate action into all elements of our work, such as:
- SUMMITS: If safe and logistically manageable, we avoid flying participants for our summits, opting for more sustainable alternatives such as train or bus. We also continue to offset the carbon emissions derived from the local hosting of our summits. Finally, we host themed summits on the topic of “Environment & Climate Action”.
- PARTNERSHIPS: We check all potential partners against our ethical partnership due diligence tool and process to ensure they are aligned to our sustainability manifesto. We also continue to bring the CXC format to other organisations that are working on the topic of “Environment & Climate Action”.
- DIGITAL: Our website runs on servers powered by 100% certified renewable energy. In addition, we aim to calculate the carbon emissions derived from our use of technical tools (e.g. Twist, Google Drive, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.), as well as our Cloud on Microsoft SharePoint once a year and offset those as well.
- OFFICE: The electricity in our headquarters in Berlin is supplied by Green Planet Energy energy from 100% certified renewable energy. Also, we have a “vegan only” policy when buying office supplies (e.g. stationery), food or drinks, and when paying for team lunches or dinners.
Finally, the guiding principles are translated into a Sustainability Checklist that offset suggestions and recommendations for our hosts and community members to run sustainable summits and gatherings. The checklist is divided into three levels depending on the hosts’ capacity to implement the suggested actions.
Our Sustainability Manifesto represents our ever-evolving commitment to sustainable changemaking. As such, we evaluate the manifesto every year to make sure we don’t become complacent and to take it to the next level.
The ChangemakerXchange Team