Meeting planners have a few more ways to boost their sustainable credentials. Meeting Professionals International Foundation announced last week the launch of the ECOS Project, which will encourage the use of green meetings and help professionals track their success.
ECOS (an acronym for Events for Communities of Sustainability) will provide an integrated approach to applying, measuring and recognizing environmental and social responsibility efforts across MPI chapters. This first initiative will be launched across the association's eight Canadian chapters from now through March 2010, when it will be assessed and modified depending on the results.
MPI has partnered with AVW-TELAV Audio Visual Solutions, which has committed to provide resources to the various chapter projects across Canada.
The effort focuses on four main areas-food, water, shelter and education.
"We wanted to make sure that people in the communities around the world where we do business have access to this, and that is not always the case," said Elizabeth Henderson, director of corporate social responsibility for MPI.
In part, this program was initiated to support MPI's commitment to the UN Global Compact, which also sets out social responsibility principles the signatories are expected to follow. Since all of MPI's chapters are run independently, the organization saw this as an opportunity to get them to collaborate.
"We thought, if we pull this together and give everybody the same focus, it's going to give it a lot more impact and we're going to be able to say, 'look at the change that you helped create,'" said Henderson.
But the individual chapters will still coordinate their projects autonomously, acting in their own communities where they see the need (though they can also commit to serve a global cause if they choose). Henderson gave the example of the representatives from the Calgary chapter, who are donating manpower to a holiday food drive, in partnership with the food bank, which provides the food itself, and with AVW-TELAV, which will provide the trucks to deliver it.
Planners can consult the ECOS Project Web site for a full toolkit on how to implement the program, including sample metrics for reporting on (such as "pounds of material recycled" or "number of families fed"), project scorecard and a template for reporting results.
Henderson said this will be of value as they look to expand the ECOS program in March of next year. "I think it's very expandable, not just geographically, but in terms of scope locally you can do something very small or quite large depending on how much manpower you have."
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