The Virtual Conscious Festival by Green is the New Black
From June 12th to June 14th, Green is the New Black hosted the first ever edition of their Virtual Conscious Festival: a three-days interactive online escape with impact that saw us crossing continents, countries, and borders from Asia to Europe and back to observe and learn first-hand about the challenges and solutions related to climate change. Workshops, talks, music, and even meditation; let’s take a look back at those three days.
A few numbers.
Ninety speakers participated in the event’s more than twenty different workshops. They were the face of sixty-three conscious brands. 1,311 persons attended over the duration of the event with an estimated 22,519,005 media coverage circulation/ outreach. This brought the PR Value of the Virtual conscious festival to $380,906. All of this would not have been possible without the fifteen volunteers who helped animating the talks, workshops and much more. The event was ticketed with prices ranging from $5 to $60 with a big chunk going towards planting a forest in the Philippines. This kept the event carbon neutral and the attendees’ footprint light.
3 days and 4 main themes.
- Wellbeing – Building resilience:
In a time of mounting anxiety, mass destruction, fires, floods and pandemics – it is more important than ever to build resilience.
- Business – Finding optimism in the crisis:
Speakers explored the opposition between capitalism and the climate, the plant-based revolution and why humans should stay optimistic about the future.
- Planet – How to reach a better future:
Participants discussed the future of climate activism, tech vs nature-based solutions and taking into account intersectionality.
- Fashion – Supporting positive industry change:
The topic of fast fashion was central to several of the workshops. Speakers presented collaborations that are leading industry to positively change.
Business to business solutions.
One of the great focus of the festival was on B2B aka business to business solutions. A healthy relationship between businesses is necessary to initiate a global movement towards a more sustainable economy. Multiple brands and speakers held workshops on the topic. Elixus Agency focused on new consumer behaviors online following the Covid-19 crisis and how businesses can adapt their Marketing strategies and leverage its digital capacity to continue growing despite the lack of interactions with customers. Food Made Good, a social enterprise which started in the UK, had a workshop on how to educate restaurants to implement environmentally responsible practices behind bars and kitchens, with a huge focus around food waste. Palo IT offered people to try out a role-playing and ideation framework to generate opportunities around key sustainability principles: Ethics, Accessibility, Inclusiveness, Sustainability and Well-being.
Wellbeing and Movement
The emphasis on wellbeing and movement was at the center of multiple talks and workshops. The psychological and physical impacts of lockdowns have already been witnessed, though they are but a fraction of the issue. Building a better model and future seems hard if people do not feel the willingness to do so or are not ready to act.
During one of their workshops, Active Giving insisted on the fact that the future of wellness needs to be one that integrates individual and corporate well-being with the health of the global ecosystem. Its two co-founders then facilitated a group practice on bringing personal truth to a shared experience.
Besides talks and thoughts, many workshops also gave the attendees an opportunity to relax and improve their own wellbeing on the spot. Xiu Nature Connections’ workshop included some explanations on what exactly is rest, why it is important, followed by a guided yoga nidra restful experience. Soma Clinic’s one, empowered its audience to understand what goes on in their nervous system in the context of relationships, identify unhelpful patterns and gave a series of tools to promote increased capacity for connection; in order to improve relationships.
Art, dance, music and live shows
Each day of the festival at 1PM United Kingdom time and 8PM Singapore time, a special event occured: The Show. The Virtual Conscious Festival had multiple artists performing a wide range of songs and dances live for the attendees. On Saturday 13th, Green is the New Black welcomed Ice Cream Sunday, La Mamie’s, Zepa Records, Beloved Sara and ClimateKeys during the music stage. Some of the guests even asked others to join them. Stage 6 offered a 2 hours ecstatic dance journey; Nicole Yau invited attendees to join in Alchemy of Dance, an intuitive movement practice combined with meditation, breathwork, Chi Gong, Tai Chi, dance, voice activation, and brain-pattern rewiring visualisation.
Congratulations to Green is the New Black for making this online edition of the conscious festival, a success despite the difficult circumstances in which the event took place. klxdate.com kl escort We thank them, as well as the speakers and all the volunteers who helped organizing it, for giving us the opportunity to learn and discover new solutions for a better tomorrow. Learn more on Green is the New Black on their website.
