Late last month, I received a surprising email that will shape the lion’s share of the volunteer time I devote to our industry over the next two years.
I wouldn’t normally be quite this excited about an opportunity to pack dozens of extra hours into a schedule that is already overloaded. But this isn’t just any opportunity.
The email came from Amy Spatrisano, the trailblazing co-founder of the Green Meeting Industry Council (GMIC). She advised me that I had been appointed to a two-year term on GMIC’s international board of directors.
My first reaction was a mix of astonishment and joy. But that quickly gave way to a quiet sense of duty.
GMIC is at a crucial stage in its development, poised to lead our industry through a rapid, high-stakes transformation that many meeting professionals have yet to spot on the near horizon. In the last several months, I have become convinced that GMIC is the organization with the focus and, increasingly, the reach and momentum to put substance behind the language of sustainable meetings, to make the very concept anything more than a nifty bit of greenwashing.
I applied for the GMIC board because I wanted to help make that change a reality. Now, it’s time to deliver.
My surprise at Amy’s email is not a matter of politeness or modesty, false or otherwise. As a GMIC member and strategic partner, I have been consistently amazed and delighted at the experience, wisdom, and sheer, relentless commitment the organization receives from its committee and chapter volunteers. As an industry supplier, I’ve learned that GMIC is one of the meetings associations where I will find a high proportion of seasoned meeting professionals and senior decision-makers.
I don’t know exactly who was nominated for the board, but I’ve come to know the GMIC community pretty well. So I’ll ask my new board colleagues to skip over this sentence when I say that, if I’d had a vote, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have voted for myself.
It’s hard to sing GMIC’s praises without implying a contrast with other industry associations, but that’s not at all what I intend. Our firm has learned and gained immensely from its 13-year association with Meeting Professionals International (MPI), and we are solidifying our participation in the Professional Convention Management Association (PCMA). Woody Huizenga and I will always be grateful to MPI for the strategic training that enabled us to reimagine our firm and refocus our product line from the ground up.
And urgent as it is for the industry to place itself on a genuinely sustainable footing, GMIC’s ability to hyper-focus in its area of specialty is enabled, to some degree, by the broader, more general reach of the larger associations.
But a cluster of issues dictates that the next three to five years will be a time for GMIC to shine. Our ability to avert catastrophic climate change will depend on the momentum we create toward drastic carbon reductions—as a civilization and, within that, as a global industry—in the next 5,000 or so days. Oil prices that spike to $200 per barrel or beyond will collapse what’s left of the airlines’ business model, forcing meetings to adopt dramatically different methods or undergo drastic cutbacks.
Program design, learning strategies, technology choices, sponsor relationships, content capture methods, ROI measures, and so much more will all be shaped and reshaped by drivers that we have only begun to fully understand. And the transition is likely to be faster than we imagine.
GMIC is the only meetings association with a clear, single-minded mission to build a sustainable industry. It’s going to be a tremendously tough road, and I can’t recall anyone offering us any guarantee of success. But what an incredible (and, yes, surprising) honour it is to be invited to help define and guide that process as a GMIC board member.