Crossing the social Gulf

  Sunset 1: View from my room

Arrived in Naples, Florida, late on Tuesday, after a flight from Gatwick via Charlotte, NC.  Hurricane country – and when I got to the beachfront Ritz-Carlton in Naples, there was a warning that work would begin at 09.00 Wednesday morning on hurricane hardening of the hotel.  It did, right on the dot.  But before that, I arrived in my room to find the most spectacular sunset in progress, after a number of storms that has passed through earlier in the day.

Was in Florida to speak at a conference organised by Novo Nordisk, a company that I have worked alongside since 1989 – and which I enormously admire.  Apart from anything else, they are one of the leading global champions of the triple bottom line, a fact around which I built my presentation for their US sales people on Wednesday. 

But the high – or at least most memorable point – in the trip was on the Wednesday evening, when the conference participants split into four separate groups to get involved in community projects.  I elected to take part in the repainting of a sheltered housing complex, partly because one of the other speakers — Flemming Junker —  was part of that group.  He was an employee-elected Director of Nordisk at the time of the merger with Novo Industri and he and I had met many moons ago when SustainAbility was helping organise and run early stakeholder engagements sessions in Denmark.

Turned out that a bus ride that I had been told would take around 30 minutes took closer to an hour, which might well have put me off had I known what to expect – I have antibodies to buses, from childhood.  But the journey did give me a chance to see more giant egrets and herons than I have seen in a very long time.  And the speed at which our group of some 50 folk repainted rooms at the Immokalee Friendship House was amazing.  See my post Repainting Poverty in Convivial Yellow on the Volans site.

Then back home, via Philadelphia, and in to the office with a day alongside Sam, pondering the way in which the invitations to speak are now piling in – in part, perhaps, because we have featured our activities in this area on the Outreach part of the Volans website.  Then home to a cold house, because Elaine is off with Hania at a film festival in Dinard.  Tired.

Sunset 2   Sunset 3   Sunset 4   We are one