Gladiator Events is now a B Corp!
Ben Fogle: A New Life in the Wild. Season 15, Episode 1: Ullapool. My5.tv
A passing comment made a real impact on me when watching this documentary over the weekend. It’s an inspiring programme, by the way. Jaw-droppingly beautiful scenery of the wild Scottish Highlands, alongside a dive into the lives of the young couple who single-handedly look after their 10,000 acre Estate with their baby son and dogs in tow.
There were some scenes that resonated with me – feeding and changing a baby while out in the Wild is something I am pretty comfortable with! But I can’t claim to be anything like as tough as this couple with what their day-to-day life entailed. They live a simple and almost completely off-grid existence, and don’t have any reliance on modern machinery or technology. This is inspirational, yet back-breakingly hard work!
Anyway, back to that comment.
Ben Fogle asked Iona, ‘Are you guys the Lairds of the land?’
Iona responded, ‘I prefer to think of myself as the Steward, of looking after the land for future generations. It’s not so short-sighted as thinking it’s anything to do with me.’
It makes such perfect sense. It shows an understanding of the responsibility she has to take care of the land, its flora and fauna, in order to keep it thriving for the future. She’s absolutely right. It’s not about us. We are simply passing through. If we all adopted this attitude, what kind of difference could we make?
If we all looked at the land surrounding us – whether a private garden, our local street or local park, and thought of ourselves as Stewards of that land, we could collectively make an enormous impact. It’s about seeing the land not as something we own, or enjoy using, but as something we have a responsibility to protect for the future.
We’re lucky enough to spend time running events on many beautiful private Estates across the UK. We’re always so careful to make minimum impact on the land, and to leave the land exactly as we found it. But this has made me think about what more we can do. How can we make a positive impact on the land we use, rather than simply returning it to its previous state? It’s our responsibility to do this. It’s something we will definitely be turning our efforts to as our events start coming back this year.
We’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas!
This pandemic has challenged me to eke out the positives of any situation. 2020 has forced us to develop tough skin and to be resilient when hit with bombshell after bombshell of challenges and news.
As a ‘glass half full’ kind of person, and being in the incredibly fortunate position of remaining healthy, I have been able to get through the past 10 months without too many major wobbles. That’s not to say it’s been easy. Isolation from family and friends, juggling caring for my two small children with running a business, a serious health crisis for one of my closest family, all 20 of our 2020 events cancelled and just dealing with the bombardment of news from around the globe tested my resilience. But we all have our own challenges during these times and I am very aware that mine are mild compared to many.
With 2020’s events all written off, I was afforded time to reflect. The pandemic put a lot of things in perspective for me. I thought hard about why I started Gladiator Events, what we are trying to achieve and how we can do better. We have a platform, so it’s important to me that we use this platform to achieve, to influence and to make an impact.
During this time I decided to become a mentor with an amazing organisation called Routes, who pair professional women with refugee and asylum-seeking women to create a mentoring partnership. I am reaching the end of a four-month mentoring journey with my mentee. Throughout this experience I have been educated, inspired and challenged. I’ve been inspired to look at ways we as a business can offer our expertise to those in need and we now have clear team targets to work with other organisations and charities to do just this.
Sustainability is another area that all of the Gladiator Events team shares a passionate desire to work towards. We have, for the first time, measured our Carbon Footprint from our 2019 events and we now have a benchmark from which to set our new targets.
We are working towards a goal of becoming B Corp certified in the near future and whilst we still have a lot of work to do to meet this goal, the shared belief of ‘being the change we seek in the world’ is motivating us to stay on track and to push towards making Gladiator Events as socially and environmentally responsible an organisation we can, and in leading the way in showing how business can become a force for good.
Sarah
About now, in any normal year, we would be right in the thick of it. Our energy would be starting to lag slightly, the skin on our hands and faces would be looking weather-beaten (or glowing, to put a positive spin on it), and we’d most likely be on our 3rd or 4th pair of heavy duty gloves. We should have 7 events under our belts by now. We should be a well-oiled machine, setting up camp at each new Estate and building, inflating, plumbing, pinning, hammering and staking our way through with precision and good humour.
But those hands and faces remain unscathed and smooth. The gloves lay piled in boxes, the timber, tools and inflatables sit mud-free and neatly stacked, gathering dust in our storage unit. We have yet to load a van with a single piece of kit, as lockdown started two days after our very first event was due to take place.
Of course, we are all desperate for things to get back to ‘normal’ so that we can return to what we love. But we are all still working to define what ‘normal’ is now.
As a company that is so committed to helping charities across the UK, we have been keen to explore how we can help in the current COVID-19 crisis. We are delighted to have partnered with Karshare UK to donate two of our Gladiator Events vans to organisations in Brighton. Instead of transporting obstacle kit around the Country, our vans are now delivering thousands of meals and provisions to vulnerable people across Brighton. We are so pleased that they are being put to good use rather than sitting redundant on the roadside.
Sadly, many of our charity partners have decided to cancel their 2020 events completely. In such an uncertain landscape it has seemed more sensible in many cases to cut losses, and limit the damage. We truly hope that we will be able to run a few of our events still in 2020, but the final decision on this may lay out of our hands.
All we can do in the meantime is plan, plan and plan for our return, whenever that may be. The safety of our staff, volunteers, participants and suppliers is always our top priority, and we cannot return until we, and all the relevant authorities, are content that we are not putting anyone at risk by doing so. We have been working hard re-designing every part of our event from start to finish, ensuring that we are adhering to social distancing, keeping our equipment and site clean, and minimising any risk of transmission. We have a plan that we are confident with, and we look forward to fine-tuning it as we all learn more about the virus, and as restrictions begin to ease.
We have seen some wonderful collaboration during this time. The Event Industry has come together across the globe in a way that we have never seen before. No-one is a competitor, we are all working together for the common cause of bringing back events in a post-COVID world, that inspire, energise and provide joy, and that allow our incredible charity partners to continue their essential work.
We know that when the events do return, they will be even more special than before. We will not take for granted any part of the experience. We will be even more committed to our Sustainability goals.
It has been awe-inspiring to see how quickly and effectively the whole world has been able to mobilise and change its behaviour during this pandemic. This gives us the belief that we can come together to make more positive change in the world, to make the world a fairer place, and to start to heal the damage that humans have caused to nature.
We look forward to seeing you all, safely, one day soon.
Sarah
Thanks to some brilliant high-profile TV shows and well known individuals, we have all become much more aware of our impact on the environment recently.
The Gladiator Events Team is working really hard to make a change to the way we operate as a Business, at our events and as consultants to our charity partners, to make sure that our events have a minimal impact on the environment.
We have already put in place a lot of changes over the past two years, including eliminating plastic bottles at almost all of our events and recycling as much of our waste as possible (currently 90% of our event waste is recycled).
However there is so much more that we can do. It can be tricky to know where to start, and this is why we’ve decided to put together a 5 year pledge, aiming to drastically reduce our carbon footprint by 2025.
We want to become industry leaders in delivering environmentally conscious events, and we are working really hard to measure, plan and implement our pledge.
We have just launched our Sustainability page on our site, as well as our Environmental Policy.
Here are some of our ideas that we will be working on over the next few months:
Measuring our Company’s annual carbon footprint for 2019, so we can set ourselves targets for 2020 and beyond
Having conversations with all our suppliers about their environmental credentials, and working with those that share our values.
Using local suppliers with short journey times
Banning single use plastic from all our caterers at 2020 events
Staff car-sharing and encouraging participant and volunteer car-sharing
Going digital - all our information documents for the event are now only available digitally
What are you doing in your organisation to work in a more sustainable way? We’d love to hear from you.