How GO Urban Went Green

GO Urban

It's a thrill to host and plan a fundraising event. You and your team get to decide where and when the event is going to take place, who will attend, what the attendees will do, and most importantly, ensure the event is going to lead to the desired result, which in almost every case means to make money. These tasks in and of themselves are extremely important and a wrong decision could spell failure, lost money, and lost time.

There are however the little decisions that aren't going to make or break the event. Interestingly enough these little decisions are the ones that have lasting impact on the attendees and the organization. This post is about those little decisions: By themselves they seem trivial, but when combined can have momentous effects.

Today, you can't check out a website without seeing the word "sustainable" somewhere in it. It seems that there are as many definitions for the word as there are websites. So what does sustainable mean? To us it means doing the right thing. Well that seems simple enough, but why does choosing the sustainable option often mean choosing the option that is less bad. Heck, that is doing the right thing, isn't it? Well, not really.

You see it's pretty easy to find an option that is less bad than another, but where it really gets difficult is when you look at every possible option, disregard all of them, and generate your own. This has been our mantra in creating and planning the GO Urban adventure race.

Before we go any further I would like to discuss the difference between our intention and our goal. Our intention, or plan, is to get people outside interacting with their environment by hosting a fun-filled citywide urban adventure race. Our goal, what we want to happen, is to make people healthier. You may be asking "why is this important?" Well a goal is a great thing, but without intent, it is pointless.

So back to the little decisions that make major impacts. You see, once we got into the weeds of planning the GO Urban race we realized there were many decisions that we could easily make that would save time, but would they be the right things to do?

Well, so much for saving time. Since our goal is to make people healthier, let's use one little decision and gauge its impact toward our goal. We've decided to provide glass reusable water bottles rather than plastic.

I'm sure you've heard by now the plastic industries three scariest letters: BPA or Bisphenol A. While the debate of potential harm to humans continues, many companies have raced to remove it from their production lines. Now BPA-Free reusable water bottles are everywhere.

So what's the big deal? I'm glad you asked. First I will answer your question with another question: how long did it take for us to figure out BPA's potential harm to humans? Well, we have known about it since the 1930's. So why chance using a substance that is known to leach chemicals for bottles that we drink purified water from?

Glass doesn't leach. This is why we drink from glasses, bottle wine in glass, and prefer to feed infants with glass bottles. In hindsight the choice was simple, provide glass reusable water bottles because they don't leach.

Risking fear of green-washing, I am going to list the vast number of other little decisions we have made for the GO Urban adventure race. I'll let you decide if we have done the right thing.

• Race t-shirts are 100 percent organic cotton, undyed, and printed with water-based inks from Eco Printworks.
• Glass reusable water bottles made by Love Bottle are provided to all competitors.
• All registration is electronic via Active.com.
• Our national partner Aatyne is providing trash bags for trash collection during the race.
• We have partnered with Deeplocal to make the entire race SMS based. All clues will be provided via text messaging rather than needlessly printed on paper.
• All our Go points promote healthy and sustainable businesses and activities.
• We have partnered with Soles4Souls Organization and will be hosting a nationwide shoe drive at all of our races.
• Our partners at Honest Tea provide a refreshing, organic beverage that we hope will replace the common soft drink.
• We have partnered with Clean Currents to power our GO Urban DC race by wind.
• All trash from race day will be recycled and composted.
• All cups used during the races will be compostable.
• We are working to provide organic beer and wine for competitors to enjoy after the race while attending our lamp lighting ceremony.
• We have partnered with Terracycle to upcycle the some of the waste generated by the GO Urban adventure race.
• We have partnered with Climate Counts a nonprofit organization who scores companies annually on the basis of their voluntary action to reverse climate change.

So decide for yourself if our race is sustainable, register online. You'll be better for it.