Mission of Eco Rotary:
The Duluth Superior Eco Rotary Club is a service organization committed to enhancing and preserving our region’s natural beauty and resources through hands-on service projects. Here we are at Grandma’s Marathon, where we help nearly 20,000 runners in the finish line area to put their food, beverages and heat shield blankets in composting, recycling or garbage — making Grandma’s the “greenest” marathon in the country!
Vision Statement:
Create a sustainability framework which balances environmental, economic and social impacts in context of an organization’s needs for live events in the Duluth/Superior communities. This includes a multi-phase approach to planning, managing and evaluating sustainable events.
Overall Key Strategic Goals
Step 1: Create a plan that are key performance indicators to track the success of each event. Identify specific activities, (such as a certain percentage of waste diversion, percentage of local or organic food, etc.) metrics for tracking, and outcomes we want to achieve for each objective identified and who is responsible for the end results.
Step 2: Engage internal stakeholders in supporting our plan. Establish or create a sustainable event policy for event team/department/meeting. This policy will reflect our internal values to support event efforts.
Step 3: Engage vendors in supporting our plan. Make the ask of your current vendors at cost savings or cost neutral pricing.Include language in your RFP process and contracts that includes vendors reporting back to you with the data you need to track your performance. (The first year can be your benchmark year to evaluate and grow in future years).
Step 4: Track Performance. Just as we monitor our event budgets, we need to monitor and track the performance of our sustainability action plans. Post Event — ensure accurate reports so we can build on them for future years.
Step 5: Communicate the Results, Celebrate the Success. While continuous improvement is always our goal as sustainability professionals; be sure to pause, breathe and share the success of event with attendees, vendors, media and the industry. The more we can quantify our results in human scale terms (amount of $$ saved, amount of trees, amount of CO2 kept out of the atmosphere), the more engaged we and our stakeholders will be for the plan the following year – if a repeat event.