Last weekend, Simply Living was at Comfest educating the community about sustainable living and was the only water refilling station at the festival. We were set up near the Peace Tent and engaged in a lot of constructive conversations.  However, we were set up near the edge of the festival opposite of where the majority of people entered from High Street. Those that stopped by our tent wanted to refill their water bottles or were genuinely interested in sustainability. After a couple people stopped to refill their bottles, I decided to start a conversation about Simply Living. The conversations I had at Comfest were valuable and helped encourage more sustainable living.

On Saturday, myself and the other interns at Simply Living gave a presentation in the Peace Tent. I introduced the Sustainable Business Directory while the others spoke about Solarise solar energy, fast fashion, environmental justice, and the Simply Living garden tour. The presentation had a great variety of topics and brought a good crowd that filled up the tent. Prior to the presentation, we were informed that there would be a projector for visual aid which ended up not being the case. For the majority of my portion of the presentation, I planned on discussing the directory and how to navigate the website. Despite not having any visual aid, we all improvised well and engaged the audience. Presenting about the Sustainable Business Directory was a great experience and gave me a chance to practice my presentation skills. 

The Sustainable Business Directory is progressing with about 340 businesses on the website. The “low hanging fruit” businesses, or the businesses that are already in Simply Living’s database, are almost all entered into the directory. Those businesses were easy because there was no need to reach out to see if they have sustainable practices. With the low hanging fruit businesses out of the way, finding other businesses will require more work but yield fewer listings. One small issue I have come across is that I forgot to cross reference some of the businesses in the directory. Meaning, if a particular business, such as City Folk’s Farm Shop, is a business member of the Columbus Greenspot Program, we need to note that in an effective way. It will not be hard to cross reference these businesses but rather time consuming. Regardless, the directory is progressing in the right direction.