Former isla cofounder Ben Quarrell and major event expert Poppy Stephenson have launched Sustainability Simplified, a consultancy that helps event and media businesses achieve their sustainability goals quicker.
Sustainability Simplified specialises in providing clear and pragmatic advice to corporate event planners, media businesses, agencies and festival, sporting & outdoor event organisers looking to reduce their environmental impact.
“Many organisations don’t know where to start when it comes to sustainability or get overwhelmed with too much information,” comments Ben. “Sustainability Simplified provides strategy, guidance, bespoke tools and training and communications support. By diving into a company’s existing operations it is able to design processes and workflows to roll out sustainability across organisations, quickly and simply with measurable results.”
The consultancy has already provided work for Nteractive, a 100-person strong global brand experience agency and Westfield Rise, the team responsible for all revenue generating activities at the two Westfield shopping centres in London.
Ben adds “I am proud of helping to found isla, the UK event industry’s collective sustainability membership organisation. Launching the business and taking it from a team of two to an organisation with over 150 members, as well as 100 companies using TRACE, was an incredible journey, and a fantastic movement for the industry. After building the carbon calculator tool and helping launch a range of other guides, I am now looking forward to working directly with event businesses to help them embed these best practices into their operations, and turn their commitments into real actions”.
Ben is joining forces with Poppy Stephenson who ran major UK festivals, from the Event Control Centre at Glastonbury to Operations Director for Boomtown. She has experience as a university lecturer teaching the next generation of event professionals and as the Learning Lead for isla, designing their training programmes and progression pathways.
Together they offer a range of bespoke services to help businesses apply sustainability advice, build this into workflows, budgets and client communications, and start reducing their carbon footprint straight away.
