Creating Impact: Embracing Your Trash Elephant

Today we’re going to travel back in time. We’re going to go all the way back to … 2005. OK, I know it’s only 20 years ago, but in the 21^st century we evolve faster than ever. And in 2005, many things were different.

Do you remember attending festivals in 2005? I do. I worked for a company in Chicago that planned all the neighborhood street festivals. During the summer, there was a festival almost every weekend in the city. They were beloved activities and people showed up in droves to attend. This particular day in August, I was standing on one of the side streets next to a 40-yard dumpster overflowing with trash. If you don’t know how large of a dumpster that is, they’re typically 22 feet long, eight feet wide and eight feet high. One holds around 12,000 pounds of waste. I was standing next to it, with trash overflowing, waiting for our vendor to arrive. You see, it was only day two of the festival and I needed to swap this dumpster out. I needed an empty one so that I could continue to collect more trash. In fact, at these festivals we would use at least 12 of these dumpsters over a two-day period.

Standing there in 2005, staring up at this dumpster I became sad. How was it possible we created this much trash in a temporary setting like a festival? Keep in mind, in 2005 we were not having conversations around event sustainability. We were not collecting recycling in temporary settings either. None of this was a part of the conversation or our planning process. I didn’t know what to do or think, so I took my sadness and buried it deep down and kept doing my job.

The years that followed took me into different areas of events. I become a corporate planner and then moved to a destination management company (DMC). Over the years, I continued to have this nagging feeling around the amount of excess the events industry produced. It continued to quietly eat away at me. I kept pushing it away. But it was this elephant in the room that I just could not ignore. In 2014, I had resolved to leave the industry. Not seeing how I could make a change and with my heart no longer aligned, I knew I had to do something different. Then I found the Green Meeting Industry Conference. This was the spring of 2014, and I was suddenly in a room with 200 people who felt the same way I did. The industry must change. We must move away from excess and into conservation.

In this room, listening to others tell their stories, I had my “ah-ha” moment. Standing next to that dumpster in 2005 was my ignition switch. It was my catalyst for change. I just hadn’t known what to do at the time. And I held that trash in the corner. It was my elephant in the room that I refused to see because it didn’t fit in the constraints of what I had to do day-to-day. Now, in an instant, all of that washed away. I brought my trash elephant and put it front and center in my room. I let it stand there and hold its place. I let it breath and I leaned in.

This moment has led me to now. Creating impact is understanding your ignition, your why, your trash elephant. You cannot create the change you want to see and therefore impact the world around you until you know what it is that you must do. Your key to success is identifying your trash elephant and shining a spotlight on it. It’s not something to be afraid of; it’s something to honor. It will lead you down the right fork in the road and set your path for impact.