This pandemic has challenged me to eke out the positives of any situation. 2020 has forced us to develop tough skin and to be resilient when hit with bombshell after bombshell of challenges and news.
As a ‘glass half full’ kind of person, and being in the incredibly fortunate position of remaining healthy, I have been able to get through the past 10 months without too many major wobbles. That’s not to say it’s been easy. Isolation from family and friends, juggling caring for my two small children with running a business, a serious health crisis for one of my closest family, all 20 of our 2020 events cancelled and just dealing with the bombardment of news from around the globe tested my resilience. But we all have our own challenges during these times and I am very aware that mine are mild compared to many.
With 2020’s events all written off, I was afforded time to reflect. The pandemic put a lot of things in perspective for me. I thought hard about why I started Gladiator Events, what we are trying to achieve and how we can do better. We have a platform, so it’s important to me that we use this platform to achieve, to influence and to make an impact.
During this time I decided to become a mentor with an amazing organisation called Routes, who pair professional women with refugee and asylum-seeking women to create a mentoring partnership. I am reaching the end of a four-month mentoring journey with my mentee. Throughout this experience I have been educated, inspired and challenged. I’ve been inspired to look at ways we as a business can offer our expertise to those in need and we now have clear team targets to work with other organisations and charities to do just this.
Sustainability is another area that all of the Gladiator Events team shares a passionate desire to work towards. We have, for the first time, measured our Carbon Footprint from our 2019 events and we now have a benchmark from which to set our new targets.
We are working towards a goal of becoming B Corp certified in the near future and whilst we still have a lot of work to do to meet this goal, the shared belief of ‘being the change we seek in the world’ is motivating us to stay on track and to push towards making Gladiator Events as socially and environmentally responsible an organisation we can, and in leading the way in showing how business can become a force for good.
Sarah