Sustainability Booklet Created in Hopes to Give Businesses a Leg Up When it Comes to Sustainable Event Hosting Practices

​In the spring of 2022, we had the opportunity to work with Jyl Steinback, the founder of Shape Up Us. Shape Up Us is a nonprofit organization working to empower children and families to lead healthier lives through awareness, education, and action-oriented programs. Our partnership with Shape Up Us challenged our project group with creating a new booklet containing ideas to make any event more sustainable. While the booklet presented Jyl the opportunity to guide her organization’s events. It also, if distributed to the public, would serve as a general resource for anyone planning events and therefore encourage sustainable events across the nation. Therefore, it became our challenge to gather information on how to make any event more sustainable- whether it was a small event such as family reunion or birthday party, or large event such as wedding or sporting event. 

Looking at our task for this project, we focused on 2 out of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals: worldwide goals founded by the United Nations to achieve a better and more sustainable future. As a team, we decided that this project best addresses Sustainable Development Goals #4 and #12: Quality Education, and Responsible Consumption and Production. A target for Quality Education aims to improve education for sustainable development and global citizenship. Our booklet will inform people on how to plan more sustainable events, thereby furthering this goal by enhancing education on sustainable events.

In regards to Responsible Consumption and Production, we work towards encouraging companies to adopt sustainable practices. By providing these resources on planning sustainable events we hope that both companies and individuals alike can gather important sustainable practices that can be utilized to get them closer to reaching their sustainability goals.

Since Jyl strives to not only educate others about health, but also sustainability, our mission was that the Shape Up Us team will create a 16-page booklet providing general tips on how to plan sustainable events by the end of the semester. As our project wraps up, the Shape Up Us team will have a blueprint for planning sustainable events while maintaining an interactive environment. 

When creating our blueprint for the semester project, we began by splitting our project into three phases or objectives. Objective 1 was to focus on researching how to make events more sustainable. For the first couple of weeks we decided to focus on researching best practices for events before taking the next step to collect ideas for implementing these particular practices. During this phase, we used the online articles, books, magazines, previous events, and other event guides as reference sources and examples. Our goal was to find and use at least 10 resources. Not only were we able to meet this goal, but we were able to exceed it by incorporating over 20 references from colleges and professional planning institutions that contained best practices in sustainable event management.

Objective 2 focused on developing the outline for the booklet, which involved determining what topics to discuss and the order they should be presented in. In doing so, we agreed that seven topics would provide us with enough information while not becoming overwhelming to the readers. We were indeed able to create seven topics as follows: Sourcing, Venue Selection, Managing Waste, Food and Beverages, Efficient Energy Use, Engagement, and Social Sustainability. This step took the most time and collaboration, as we created and revised many organizational possibilities, each with their own benefits and problems. 

Our final objective was to design the layout of the booklet, which was again split into multiple steps. To complete this objective, we first focused on laying down the written content on each of the pages. Next we decided on deciding what information to incorporate onto each page. Lastly, we made sure we could create those 16 pages as requested by our project partner, Jyl.

We are happy to contribute to more sustainable events for our project partner and optimistic that our green event guide can help others to coordinate more sustainable events. We already expect to put some of the best practices we found into action during our own events the next time we host. 

Authors: Kristen Keller, Jacob Bethem, Yasmin Calderon, Harshit Tyagi, Lauren Taylor, Kailey Saenz