Think Sustainable: Janneke Leenaars, Interface Sustainability Manager

Think Sustainable Janneke Leenaars Interface Sustainability Manager

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically changed the way we work and live. With the epidemic, we are witnessing the importance of sustainable development efforts to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals more than ever. We have, once again, realized how poverty reduction, increasing the quality of education, creating decent employment, entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity can contribute to human life and the nature in myriad ways.

Based on the vision of a more sustainable and more harmonious lifestyle with the planet, we have started to discuss and question the responsibilities of individuals and institutions more when it comes to the global sustainability vision. It goes without saying that private sector plays an important role in realizing the sustainability goal worldwide. Thus its sustainability endeavours could help to inspire many institutions and individuals in how they adapt, revolutionize and harmonize the ways they think, produce and live towards a more sustainable life style.

To that end, we will be hosting Interface’s Benelux, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe and Emerging Markets Sustainability Manager Janneke Leenaars in our second Think Sustainable program where we try to reach out to pioneering individuals and institution representatives that have been making great efforts to contribute to the planet and society with their out-of-the-box and innovative ideas, and talk about their projects, sustainability visions and future predictions. In our interview with Ms Leenaars, we will talk about Interface’s sustainability vision and projects, its innovative formula of embedding sustainability to its production and supply chain management as well as their predictions on the implications of a post-COVID world for Turkey and the rest of the world. In this 45-minute broadcast, which we hope will be more interactive with questions and comments from you, we will be exploring how the strategic corporate sustainability vision can affect institutions, individuals and our planet, based on the extraordinary and innovative production model developed by Interface.

We are waiting for you all to the second broadcast of the Think Sustainable program, which will be broadcast live on Tuesday, January 12 at 13:00.

Think Sustainable: Jodie Harburt, Cooking Up Dialogue

think sustainable

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically changed the way we work and live. With the epidemic, we are witnessing the importance of sustainable development efforts to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals more than ever. We have once again realized how poverty reduction, increasing the quality of education, creating decent employment, entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity can contribute to human life and the nature.

As the Sustainability Steps Association, we’d like to introduce a new program in order to talk about sustainability from different perspectives and with its practices all over the world. In our new program called Think Sustainable, which will be broadcasted live in English on our YouTube channel every month as of December, we will reach out to pioneering individuals and institution representatives that have been making great efforts to contribute to the planet and society with their out-of-the-box and innovative ideas, and talk about their projects, sustainability visions and future predictions.

The first guest of our program will be Jodie Harburt, co-founder of Cooking Up Dialogue. In our first program, we will talk with Jodie on the Terra Madre network, the Slow Food Movement, and the Cooking Up Dialogue project as well as gaining insights on why and individuals refuse to surrender to industrialization in agriculture and the standardization of food cultures. We will also discover how powerful the dialogues on food could become in reconnecting to ourselves, the planet and with each other through an understanding of our differences with a more open-mind and open-heart.

We welcome you all to the Think Sustainable program, which will be broadcast live on Tuesday, December 8, at 21:00.

Think Sustainable: Jodie Harburt, Cooking Up Dialogue

think sustainable

"Our food, our planet, our future"

The first episode guest of the Think Sustainable program, prepared and presented by Gül Ulu, a member of the Sustainability Steps Association, was Cooking Up Dialogue co-founder Jodie Harburt. In the program, the relationship of the Cooking Up Dialogue Project with Terra Madre, Slow Food and Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) was discussed in terms of food safety, human rights, women’s empowerment, collective empowerment by building bridges between individuals.

Terra Madre, a global platform designed by the Slow Food Organization, is an umbrella platform that provides opportunities for small food producers, as Jodie Harburt points out. Cooking Up Dialogue is one of the organizations under this umbrella. Within the scope of the project, Jodie and its partners carry out social gastronomy projects where not only women but also LGBTI + people come together and recipes and stories about these recipes are shared.

Referring to an alternative perception of differences, Jodie Harburt said, “The fascinating thing about bringing people from different cultures, heritage and backgrounds together is that we can see that differences bring incredible diversity and richness to the table rather than causing a conflict. Cooking Up Dialogue celebrates variety and its simplicity. “We all eat and we all have a story.”

Finally, it was stated in the program that everything is interrelated, environmental justice and social justice are the same. Jodie said: “The Cooking Up Dialogue Project provides the opportunity to bring problems and solutions together. To tackle current problems, we need to overcome the polarization that prevents policy makers from making the right decisions, and raise the voices of women and minorities for the whole society. “

Hacer Foggo from Deep Poverty Network is the guest of the Sustainability Agenda

Deep Poverty Network, Hacer Foggo, Sustainability Day

The 2030 Agenda recognizes that the eradication of poverty in all its forms and dimensions, including extreme poverty, is the biggest global challenge and an indispensable requirement for sustainable development. With the pandemic, this issue came up even more.

In this process, important problems and changes occurred in many areas from access to food to education. Well;

  • What is Deep Poverty?
  • What does the Deep Poverty Network do?
  • What are the examples of positive change in this period of increasing despair?
  • What can we do to permanently eradicate Deep Poverty?

Our Sustainability Agenda program, where we seek answers to these questions and more with Hacer Foggo from Deep Poverty Network, is on our Youtube channel on Thursday, October 22 at 19.30.

We expect you all to this conversation.

You can watch our previous Sustainability Agenda publications in the video below.

Click for our Youtube channel.

Communication for Goals Project Starts

As the Sustainability Steps Association, we implement Communication for Goals project with the support of the Consulate General of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The Communication for Goals project starts in order to identify the problems accurately in the focus of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), to make visible the generated solutions to the problems, to establish communication networks in order to access the right information and to follow current affairs.

We designed the Communication for Goals project to promote independent journalism among the university students in communications related departments such as journalism, radio television, art and design. With the project, young people will be able to follow the changes experienced in the transition to the knowledge economy, see the processes that lead to these changes, understand how the experts deal with the issues and benefit from their experiences.

They will be able to find clues on how to relate the news content with the Sustainable Development Goals in order to approach the problems experienced with a holistic perspective through workshops.

Young people will meet the NGOs and independent media outlets and produce written and visual content voluntarily for these institutions.

Details of the program and applications will be announced soon.

The guest of the Sustainability Agenda will be Salim Kadıbeşegil, Founder of RepMan Reputation Research Center

Sustainability Steps Association, Turkey and reputation management in the world, corporate governance, sustainability, brand identity in areas such as information sharing and aimed at the accurate transfer of information RepMan Reputation Research Center founder and Advisory Board Member Salim Kadıbeşegil welcomes.

In today’s conditions, it is very important how brands deal with the concepts of “brand reputation” and “reputation management” so that they can stand out in the global market and gain consumer trust and loyalty. During the pandemic, brands found that they had to understand changing consumer behavior and adapt their brand strategies to new conditions. While some institutions successfully managed their reputation with their attitudes, approaches to the agenda and the bond they established with the consumer during this period, some institutions damaged the brand reputation with critical marketing mistakes.

The Sustainability Agenda, where we will talk about the relationship of reputation with sustainability, the individual and institutional changes brought about by the pandemic process, and the “new normal that should be” after the epidemic, is on our Sustainability Steps Association Youtube channel on Monday, December 17, 2020.

We expect everyone to our event.