2020 Summit Theme: Convergence

Purchasers, investors, and responsible suppliers are increasingly, and intentionally converging to align their demand signals, and compel their business partners to integrate support for a healthy, just and abundant world as a fundamental part of doing business.

As these communities align, they are also innovating to develop overarching strategies that address social, environmental and economic impacts rather than single-issue improvements.

At the 2020 Summit in Atlanta we will focus on this convergence – looking to elevate ways that our community can continue to come together to create and proliferate ‘best of the best’ practices that create multiple benefits

• across social, economic and environmental endpoints
• across purchaser, investor and supplier roles
• across product and service categories
• across company, sector and geographic boundaries

Submit Now!

Submit a Panel, Interactive Workshop, Lightning Talk or Innovation Accelerator Roundtable proposal to make sure you have a chance to share your story with peers and leaders in the sustainable purchasing community. You can find more information on these submission types and other practical details here and more information on highlighted themes below.

Submit NOW

You’ll be directed to a login page and asked to create a user name and password to access the submission site. Questions? Contact katie@meetgreen.com

Highlighted Submissions Themes

This Call for Submissions is (as always) open to all purchasers, suppliers and advocates with a compelling story to share about successful positive impact through purchasing strategies of all kinds. 

Bring your best stories of breakthroughs, benefits, and category or program strategies that have created change, or showcase nascent innovations designed to help create such solutions. 

We welcome presentations that: 

• address a category-specific experience or approach (e.g. leasing instead of purchasing an IT product)
• address the power of a specific strategy across different categories (e.g. science-based targets or circular procurement) 
• showcase a collaborative effort that yielded results (e.g. a supplier/purchaser innovation project, a sectoral collaboration to reduce environmental or social harm)

This is the place and time to share your journey, solicit feedback and tell your peers what worked, to help all of us go farther faster.

Convergence Focus

Beyond that open invitation, this year we will highlight initiatives where stakeholders and strategies converge in ways that broaden and deepen benefits. Stories of innovative, multidimensional strategies that engage diverse actors – purchasers, investors, suppliers, governments – to demand and deliver products and services in ways that cross role and organizational boundaries and address multiple issues in creative and compelling ways.  

To give just a few broad outlines, we are looking for presentations on:

• Sourcing strategies that positively impact ecosystems and the financial and social well-being of the people who live in them; 
• Circular economy approaches that reduce resource consumption and provide new jobs to under-resourced communities; 
• Strategic supplier and purchaser engagements to share the risks of building new, more sustainable, production and delivery systems;
• Efforts to increase supplier diversity and help diverse suppliers build the capability to deliver environmentally sustainable solutions; 
• Impact sourcing that helps build economic participation by marginalized groups and produce more environmentally sustainable products.

Submit NOW

You’ll be directed to a login page and asked to create a user name and password to access the submission site. Questions? Contact katie@meetgreen.com

Find more detailed information on submission types, lengths and submission process HERE.