A Royal Moment of Zen

ELIA executive director Maria Hansen describes how the ELIA team are implementing environmental change, thinking strategically and getting ready to enjoy the summer break.

The European summer time at ELIA is often a moment to pause and work on strategic topics that we otherwise don’t have time for. A couple of weeks ago, we had our ELIA Strategic Day which the ELIA Team used to work on two major topics. You may recall that we were part of the SHIFT project and in that context led the work on creating environmental guidelines for cultural networks. Now that we have these, we need to work on implementation, and our time together was spent exploring things we find easy, and not so easy, about these norms which specify how we go about travel, events, working together at the office and creating policy around this.

We built in a moment with Sander Verschuren, expert from the Green Leisure Group, who surprised all of us with some challenging quiz questions and then answered our questions from his experience as auditor for sustainability labels. Some elephants in the room were debated heavily, like a plastic-free lunches at the office (how to combine that with a busy family life?).

This led to some amazing ideas and (from my vantage point) much greater (shared) lunches in the weeks following. We agreed that we are in this together and that’s how we intend to get results.

Our afternoon was spent reworking the ELIA Strategic Compass for the coming years which made us realise how far we had come in the past two years. Fun fact: the term ‘online event’ did not even appear in our last Compass edition which is dated January 2020. Now ‘online programmes’ are an unmissable part of ELIA’s offer, creating access to the network for many more colleagues than ever before.

After all these brain gymnastics, we were ready for the ELIA Fun Day which took us to Apeldoorn in the Netherlands where the head office of ELIA’s corporate partner Royal Talens is located. The Royal Talens team treated us royally (!) to a fascinating tour of their paint factory which was followed by the most remarkable creative workshop. Even for those of us who couldn’t remember when the last time was that they held a paint brush, this was a wonderful moment of zen – and of course also a great opportunity to get to know the excellent products that Royal Talens creates.

We ended the day with a gregarious dinner but not before having admired the magnificent gardens of the ‘other’ Royals in town, at the Palace Het Loo which for hundreds of years was one of the residences of the Dutch Royal family and now serves as a museum. A great place for a group photo as you can see above. 

I am hoping that you will have such moments of zen yourself in the coming weeks. Perhaps this might be a good moment to consider an application to join the ELIA Representative Board? Or check out – if you missed it – the recent European project wins that ELIA is involved with. As for me, I will slow-travel my way through the Northern Europe this summer, enjoying time with family, treasures from the ELIA reading list (coming to your inboxes soon), and my hiking boots.

Very best wishes for a restful summer!