The Challenge Your World Blog

I've been spending a fair amount of my time on planning our spring conference here in Montreal. Having attended about 30 of them in the past, both as a participant and speaker, I have a fairly good idea of what I think is a good event, but I wanted to see what other people thought. I Googled my question and came across some of the following blogs on conferences of various types: Lars Hinrichs from professional networking site Xing said the infamous TED is the best conference he's ever been to, and it's not hard to see why. With an amazing mix of the most fascinating people in the world (there's an extensive screening/application process just to [...]

Everywhere you turned on the streets of New York and Boston yesterday, you came across three by now familiar words: Yes We Can. And everywhere else the face of the man America – and surely the world – hopes will rescue the world’s largest economy from the nosedive it entered in September last year. Over 2 million turned out for the ceremony on the Washington Mall, and the sense of hope – and desperation – was palpable. They said it was only the fourth time a poet had spoken at a Presidential Inauguration, and while Ms. Elizabeth Alexander’s words were quietly touching, the man whose words most deeply stirred my heart was Obama himself. It was the [...]

In the years since I first became fascinated by the complex concept of sustainability and sustainable development and its widespread and varied applications, I have read a wide variety of subject matter from authorities in the field. My personal interests range from understanding the origin of environmental issues to the development of governmental policy and international policy instruments to macro-economics and humanistic philosophy, with a dash of product design and social networking thrown in for variety. Thus I will start listing some of the most important books that have shaped my theory and invite you to share your own. The first book is [...]

Today we had our first in-house, all-team sustainability discussion, which I had the honour of leading. We brainstormed keywords, reviewed the history of the development of the concept, and talk a closer look at some of the important leaders and ideas that have emerged in the field over the past half-century. A term that resonated with everyone strongly was balance. We've been joking around at the office a lot recently about the sustainability or 'unsustainability' of different personal activities and lifestyle choices, stemming from a response I made a few weeks ago when posed a question about how one makes choices in a world of complexity and [...]

Hi everyone, My name is Cameron Stiff, and I am the Director of Sustainability for Challenge Your World. It is an honour and a privilege to be part of such an incredibly exciting and important initiative at such a crucial time in our collective history, and I am looking forward to helping launch this amazing initiative which is all about developing sustainability entrepreneurship in the 21st century green economy. So what is sustainability anyway? It is a highly contentious and important idea that, over the past few years and decades, has found itself of increasing relevance to companies, governments, organizations and people all over the planet. [...]