Speaker. Conference Chairperson. Leadership Capacity Builder. Executive Educator.
Victoria Hurth regularly presents and educates a range of executive and public audiences in a variety of formats. The main focus of these engagements is to use the power of communication to gift leaders with a bird’s eye view of the landscape of sustainability, ESG and purpose. By joining the dots and helping people situate their position in the transformational shift underway, they can leapfrog their leadership and supercharge their roles as change agents.
Highlights
Anthropy, UK November 2022 and November 2023
Victoria has supported John O’Brien MBE, founder of Anthropy, in his ambitious plan to create THE national annual gathering where a multi-stakeholder audience can co-create the future of Britain. The conference takes over the Eden Project and is fully supported by its founder Sir Tim Smit. In this role, Victoria has designed, led and contributed to a wide range of sessions including ‘The Future of Marketing’ and ‘The End of Purpose-Washing?’.
Keynote: Why unsustainability is one big governance failure and why quality governance can fix it at the European Organisation for Quality (EOQ) Annual Conference, November 2023
Victoria was invited to help open the 2023 EoQ’s Annual conference to an audience of around 1,000 delegates from across the continent. Following Portugal’s Minister for the Economy, Victoria set out a forceful case for why bad governance is at the heart of unsustainability and why (and how) governance can create a sustainable economy and, therefore, world.
The Summit on Responsible Investment, Canada July 2023
Victoria was invited to deliver the opening keynote presentation, ‘The Purpose Led Economy’, at the Summit on Responsible Investment, an event hosted by the Canadian Securities Exchange in collaboration with Sparx Publishing Group and designed to empower investors and entrepreneurs by sharing SRI and ESG insights and best practices. In her keynote, Victoria educated the crowd on moving toward a purpose-led wellbeing economy, the importance of long-term thinking and good governance, the role of marketing and frameworks for purpose-driven organizations.
Invited expert on why purpose is vital to addressing sustainability
Victoria was invited to appear as a guest on a two-part episode of Kantar’s Sustainable Futures podcast. She joined host Jonathan Hall and Kantar's Sustainable Transformation Practice members, Jeremy Schwartz, Chairman, and Ozlem Senturk, Senior Partner, to discuss purpose, sustainability and marketing.
Bringing challenges, insights and fresh thinking to boards, CEOs and senior executives
Victoria is regularly engaged by companies to bring a fresh way of thinking about sustainability, ESG, purpose and innovation. She has worked with a wide range of clients, including SACE, an Italian state-owned insurance agency that underwrites Italian export activity on behalf of the Ministry of Finance. In November 2022, she was commissioned to inspire and enlighten their most senior stakeholders and help SACE consider how it might understand and articulate its purpose. As part of her engagement with SACE, she was interviewed by mainstream and specialised ESG media outlets:
- https://studio.corriere.it/sace-sa1-sostenibilita-innovazione-pmi/
- https://www.ilfoglio.it/economia/2022/11/23/news/sace-mef-guida-per-imprese-sociali-la-lezione-di-victoria-hurt-guru-della-sostenibilita--4690515/
- https://www.adnkronos.com/sace-riunisce-gli-stakeholders_2mHpjiE93i7jLMwHe98NSw
Summarising the big picture of purpose and why it is vital for sustainable business
In 2021, Victoria was invited by Michael Mainelli, now Lord Mayor of the City of London, to present and be interviewed by him as part of his Z/Yen's FS Club online series. Her session, ‘What Does It Really Mean To Be A Purpose-Driven Company?’ covered the big picture of what is wrong with our current organising of the market economy and the role we ask business to play as part of that. She also included a summary of the three logic model as visualised through the modified 'Daly Triangle'.
A follow-up presentation summarising the role of governance in fixing unsustainability can be found here.
Corporate Sustainability – Deepening our understanding of organisations and purpose
IEMA (Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment) invited Victoria to speak at this webinar, where she discussed how uniting the energy of an organisation to drive positive wellbeing impact is at heart of the sustainability challenge and set out a model for de-coding corporate organisations in relation to this.
Kicking off the United Way BC Social Purpose Institute’s 2023 Purpose in Business Week
In this one-hour webinar hosted by the United Way BC Social Purpose Insititute (SPI), Victoria kicked-off the third annual Purpose in Business Week by providing insight into the ‘big picture’ of the Wellbeing Economy, tools, resources and actionable steps businesses can take to reorient to purpose and what a world that is purpose-driven would look like.
Building back a net-zero resilient economy through Governance, Policy, Standards, Skills and Inclusion panel at COP26
Victoria sees standards as critical to a sustainable future and invests much of her voluntary time in supporting their development. In this UNFCCC side event at COP26, Victoria joined a panel including Silvio Dulinsky (Deputy Secretary-General at ISO), Scott Steedman (ISO Vice-President (Policy) and Director-General, Standards, BSI), Sarah Mukherjee MBE (CEO IEMA) and Helena Leurent (Director General Consumers International) for a session on building back a net-zero resilient economy through Governance, Policy, Standards, Skills and Inclusion.
Interviewing Greta Thunberg and leading climate scientists at COP24
Along with the late ever-controversial and forthright Stuart Scott, Victoria co-chaired a number of sessions for the Scientist Warning to Humanity series at the IPCC Pavilion at the 24th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP24) in Katowice, Poland. These sessions covered leading but lesser-heard expert voices and commentaries on topics such as carbon sequestration technologies, business responses, the COP process and legal redress.
Interviews with Greta Thunberg:
- ‘Greta Thunberg's School Strike for the Climate’ with co-host Stuart Scott and Greta Thunberg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6s8YgRH5T0
- ‘Straight Talk’ with co-host Stuart Scott, Greta Thunberg and her father Svante Thunberg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiD04TRwebQ&list=PL4R918acpNU5VyfZSHgc8ZLpt2JgSJiJ-&index=2
Other interviews and presentations at COP24
- ‘Scientists' Warning to Humanity & Business as Un-usual’ with Stuart Scott: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8PWkZ7FB5s
- ‘A Rule Book for the Climate Casino’ with co-host Stuart Scott, Kevin Anderson and Hugh Hunt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5voJj0DMHiI
- ‘Suing the B@stards’ with co-host Stuart Scott, Dan Galpern (Dr James Hansen's legal representative) and Sarah Mead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZhsrJIkfDM
- ‘We Don't Have Time’ with co-host Stuart Scott, Greta Thunberg and Mårten Thorslund: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqlTtZ0UyFE
- ‘Restoring the Web of Life’ with co-host Stuart Scott and Dr Tony Juniper: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoTyDDyFkSU
- ‘Getting off (climate disruption) with our Rocks’ with co-host Stuart Scott and Dr David Beerling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iAqxOMy61U
Global Compact Network (Portugal) and Portuguese Association for Enterprise Ethics (APEE) Keynote, November 2023
Victoria was invited to contribute the opening keynote to this annual network conference. Here she set out the case for the three-level shift to a Wellbeing Economy, delivered by Purpose-Driven Organisations and powered by Meaningful Work and Lives. Watch on YouTube.
Other Highlights
Sustainability in conversation with Dr Victoria Hurth
Victoria joined Neil Wilkins on the Neil Wilkins Podcast to share insights and discuss how everyone is in a position to make a difference if they can identify with their values and find their purpose.
How can purpose unlock system-wide sustainability transformations?
Victoria Hurth discussed how purpose can help companies position sustainability at the core of their operations - for widespread change on this episode of the FutureReady podcast, powered by COSYN.
How to Optimize the Wellbeing Machine Podcast with Innate Motion
Victoria joined Benoit Beaufils, Founding Partner at Innate Motion, and Shad Raouf, Show Host, to discuss how to move from a profit-first system to a purpose-first system and collectively transform our economy into a wellbeing machine.
