PERSONAL SUSTAINABILITY STANDARDS

LEYLA ACAROGLU 

I am extremely committed to sustainability - environmentally, socially, professionally and personally. It permeates all that I do, and integrity is the backbone of all my initiatives. My team and I assess the change feasibility and potential positive impact outcomes of all projects, event invitations and commissions based on our sustainability criteria. 

I am always proud and excited to be invited to contribute and present all over the world at events, within organizations and on projects. I know the importance of being physically present at these talks, workshops and events, and I am also very mindful of the impact of my actions. As such, travel is done within the following sustainability standards. Here I have outlined my position on how I am willing to travel, how I mitigate the impact of when I do, and when I prefer to opt for a less carbon-intensive way to engage. 

ENVIRONMENTAL

Wherever possible, I prefer to provide knowledge and expertise digitally, as this immediately reduces the environmental and personal impact of traveling to be at an event in person. I already travel a great deal for my work in activating global systems change through the UnSchool and Disrupt Design, and I invested in sequestering carbon impact through the CO Project Farm regeneration project and other commercial ways.

Of course, being physically present is always a different experience, and I recognize that it’s critical to the success of events and programs and often a more impactful outcome. Therefore, I am willing to travel when the act of doing so will enable me to effect positive change in the location I am going to. To make it less impactful to attend events and lead projects, I relocated to Europe to take shorter flights and reach more people; I also restrict the number of international flights per year I will take and combine engagements when doing so to avoid unnecessary travel. This means I can only agree to attend a certain number of international engagements that require long-distance travel every year. 

When I do travel, I take all efforts to reduce the impact of this action by only taking the shortest and most direct flights, as well as by purchasing carbon offsets on all available booking services. I prefer to stay in eco-hotels (there are many!) and only eat vegan meals to reduce the impact of factory farming. Each of us has the power to make individual choices that have positive or negative impacts on the world around them, so I make sure, wherever I can, to be the most responsible, sustainable traveler and participant in global systems that I want to see more of. 

If you are inviting me to your event, please ensure your event is also taking action to reduce its environmental impact in the areas of packaging, food and transport. We have a sustainable event checklist available for free (see below) that we send all speaking clients to support you in this.

PERSONAL

The other important factor is personal sustainability. I am invited to be involved in way more things than I can physically do! Since I’m constantly traveling while also running several organizations (Disrupt Design, UnSchool & Swivel Sills), there is an impact on my personal well-being associated with every event or project I take on.

My professional passion is to engage and inspire as many people in positive change as possible, which is a very energy-intensive process. This can be difficult to do with the high quality I expect of myself when I don’t have the time to regenerate between engagements to ensure that I am able to dedicate the appropriate amount of energy to each project or event.

This is why I have to decline invitations to many events that I am invited to, even if I strongly believe in them and would otherwise love to be involved. If I can’t, where possible I will try and provide a pre-recorded video or recommend a colleague from my organizations or alumni from the UnSchool when they are local and thus much closer, as this also helps to reduce travel. 

PROFESSIONAL

I custom design all my talks and work to ensure that what I am delivering fits the community I am speaking to in a highly inspiring and effective way. Each event I commit to takes at least a full day of preparation and one or two days of travel, in addition to the days I am engaged to physically be there. 

This means each event I do takes an average of 4 days of my time, which I would otherwise be investing in writing, developing and doing creative change projects, running my social enterprises, teaching programs or researching more on how we can solve complex social and environmental issues. This is why I only commit to a certain number of the events I am invited to attend to ensure that of what I am contributing, the quality is high and the relevance is refined. 

I also feel it’s very important that expertise is appropriately remunerated. If you are charging for your event or are set to profit of the knowledge that I a sharing with you, then it’s only fair that I should be appropriately financially remunerated. Therefor, I won’t do corporate events for free, nor will I agree to do ticketed events for the appropriate compensation for my time and contributions.   

Please respect me and my work by not asking for me to do work for free unless it’s for a fundraiser, a community event or has clear social benefit.

SOCIAL COMMITMENT 

I am committed to giving away a minimum 20% of my content and time for free, this is across all my organisations and speaking engagements and I ask my clients to also do this to ensure that knowledge is accessible. You can find a lot of free resources at the UnSchool. We also publish journal articles, and I write and share on Medium and LinkedIn.

I am deeply committed to equitable access to my programs and projects, and we build a 20% open source clause into all our creative project contracts. It is amazing when forward-thinking collaborators take the opportunity to fund the development of this type of work, and open it up to be accessed by all (such as the Circular Classroom). 

We, ourselves, do the same for all our Disrupt Design and UnSchool projects. Every UnSchool program has scholarships and fee-free places for people who meet our equity access criteria, and over the years, we have given away hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of programs.

As all my work is unfunded (meaning we have to generate revenue to fund the projects we do), the only way that my small team and I can continue to do this work, develop this content, and make change is through doing paid commission work and receiving equitable and appropriate payment for the things we create and the time we invest. This applies to my speaking engagements, commissioned projects and self-initiated toolkits. 

Once everyone is paid fairly, we then redistribute resources to the development of more creative open source content which allows us to take on pro bono or low/no-fee work. I therefore am committed to applying this 20% model to dedicate time for low/no fee engagements and projects every year (please send through an inquiry for this here).

I appreciate you taking the time to read this personal sustainability statement. This is an evolving document, changing as my skills and commitments do too. One thing that never wavers is my personal life-long commitment to be a positive force for change so that we can design a future that works better for all of us. I hope you are inspired to join this journey too. 

Sustainability in Events Checklist

Events can have a significant environmental impact, so we have prepared this simple checklist to help event organisers ensure that they are reducing unintentional negative impacts wherever they can.