Sustainability Community of Action

Our Mandate

Our Mission is “to engage, inspire, equip and mobilise, current and next generation project professionals and collaborators to optimise our impact towards the UN SDG’s and make the world a better place”.

Who are we?

We are people who work in project management, as project managers or in other roles within project delivery. We’re creating a Community of Action to give people an opportunity to share where they are making progress towards sustainability, so we can all learn about what is working.

We also want to share where we are facing obstacles, and to share ideas that others could use, even if there are organisational or sector barriers in our places of work.

If we all work together, we can accelerate the transformation of project management as a profession - and time is running out.  

Unless we work together, how are we going to meet the UN Sustainable Development Goals by 2030? How are we going to respond to the Climate and Biodiversity Emergencies?

It’s already 2023. We don’t have time for the sustainability agenda to move forwards at its existing pace. So far, we have only missed the targets we have set ourselves.

So the Sustainability Community of Action is looking to focus on 3 areas:

• Concepts Collection: A library of ideas and innovations for new approaches to project management
• Common Capabilities: A common skillset, developing the project managers to deliver the projects the future needs
• Commitments and Case Studies: A platform where member organisations can demonstrate accountability against their commitments, and showcase their successes

We are committed to learning from each other, to engaging others, and building a community that has the capability and capacity to tackle this global crisis.

No single person, no single organisation, no single country, can solve this. But together, we can.

Sustainability, Systems Thinking and Solutions

We have to move away from a model of ‘projects in isolation’. Our current approach is not good at taking into account the ripples that radiate out from our projects through the environment, such as embodied carbon or waste in complex, global supply chains.

And we are not good at grasping opportunities to improve social outcomes or the economy – we are generally at the mercy of prevailing trends. Money is one of our key constraints, and we seek to minimise cost. Environmental considerations are often treated as obstacles. Social outcomes are often converted into monetary values in the early stages of projects, if they are considered at all, and then are often steadily diluted through the life of a project once the time, cost and quality pressure hits.

• What if we could look at this a different way?
• What if we saw projects as being interventions within systems?
• What if we moved away from an ‘additive’ model, where we are always trying to ‘add something new’ through a project, or a model where we have space to fill in the gaps. What if the space was already overcrowded?
• What if, instead, we tried to make the most efficient, the most effective interventions within systems, optimising our time, effort and resources to achieve our desired outcomes?

And that’s what we’re exploring – do you want to explore with us?