We spoke to the purpose-driven social impact leaders of our partner companies during the COVID-19 pandemic to find out the challenges they faced, how they resolved to overcome them, and their thoughts on accelerating Shared Impact.
In this series, meet Lucia Loposova, Program Manager of GREEN Hospitality. 
GREEN Hospitality’s primary mission is to encourage businesses to work together in order to bring about sustainable, cross-border advancements to the global hospitality industry through innovative and engaging events and activities. Unlike other sustainability initiatives within the hospitality space, GREEN Hospitality focuses on all aspects in regards to hospitality, including hotels, supply chains, airlines, food, and others.
GREEN Hospitality aims to promote knowledge exchange amongst all related industries to advance sustainable development in the hospitality industry. Tell us more about the work you do to realize this goal.
We run multiple activities that impart knowledge and promote sharing within the industry. These include Happy Hour Talks, Research Briefs, Reports and Toolkits, Think Tanks, G.R.E.E.N conferences and Hackathon.
The pandemic has caused many unprecedented challenges for social impact organizations whose operations involve physical events and fundraising activities. What are the unique challenges faced by GREEN Hospitality, and how did you overcome them? What are the major lessons you have learnt that would go into building resilience in your organization, and/or further your impact going forward?
The industry we are working with is one of the worst-hit sectors, thus most of our stakeholders experienced financial difficulties. It has imposed financial pressure on us as our partners cannot support us through sponsorship or other avenues. A lot of our activities involve face-to-face engagements, and due to the pandemic, it has been challenging to keep the community engaged and updated.
What kind of support do you think is needed in Hong Kong for social impact organizations like yours, in good times and bad?
Appropriate funding with budgets that can support quality staff to be hired on high-impact projects, and fewer barriers for access to funding, especially for smaller or new organizations that nonetheless do high-impact work.
What is the systems’ change that GREEN Hospitality seeks?
Our vision is to turn the hospitality industry into a catalyst for sustainability. Our mission is to advance research, incubate innovations and foster activities that enable the hospitality industry to achieve Sustainable Development Goals in the interest of the planet, people and prosperity.
Our mantra is the theory of change. We intend to achieve this by creating a platform for our stakeholders to share knowledge, exchange experience, foster partnerships, and identify business opportunities and innovate for sustainable development.
The hospitality industry has an impact on various aspects of sustainable development, such as resource utilization, waste management, or forced labor. Our three pillars provide our members and partners with the knowledge, networks, and shared resources required to address sustainability issues within their organizations.
We share sector-specific knowledge and new thinking based on our expertise, solutions, and innovations, as well as those of our stakeholders, including our partners. To that end, we produce and organize research, guides and toolkits, Happy Hour Talks and research briefs, as well as thought leadership. Another key initiative of ours is connection building. We bring together relevant parties from across the entire sustainable hospitality supply chain to foster collaboration through conferences, think tanks and industry roundtable discussions. Additionally, we highlight and share ideas, innovations, and actionable real-world solutions that have an identifiable business impact through hackathons, business cases and testimonials.
Lastly, where do you see GREEN Hospitality five years from now?
As an Asian hub for tackling climate change through innovative solutions and collaboration across the hospitality industry, including hotels, F&Bs, airlines, property developers, event organizers and more.
