Introduction Letter by S-HUB Founder Andreas Friis

Insights into an ambitious journey - creating the new leading community and platform for sustainable business and leadership in Norway.

Dear Friends,

March 1st was a big day for us. That was the day our new grassroots initiative Sustainability Hub Norway was formally born. On this day we got our organizational number from the Norwegian government and were now officially registered as a non-profit association.

The initiative has been under planning for a while - but has picked up pace since November last year when Co-Founders Cilia Holmes Indahl and Ingrid Helsingen Warner came onboard. We decided to speed up and beta-launch the concept, and soon we got a lot of interest - among others from the great people in our core crowdfounder team - extremely talented individuals that wants to help build Sustainability Hub, because they see the need for such a community here in Norway.

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​Why did we start S-HUB?

30 years ago this year, Gro Harlem Brundtland and her commission defined the word «Sustainable Development» in the report «Our Common Future». That sort of makes Norway the intellectual birthplace for the term.

But in the recent years our dear motherland has been lagging behind when it comes to sustainable business and leadership, when this should have been built upon to create a superior advantage for Norway. We should be the #1 country in the world for sustainable development and sustainable business. We should take absolute global leadership in this field. Here Norway as a country has a clear opportunity, and it’s about time to reclaim the throne.

We are one of the wealthiest countries in the world. We’ve gotten rich on extracting natural resources that happened to be within our borders. We have a great free-for-all education system, with equal opportunities to succeed.  Our work-life balance and social welfare is among the best in the world. We have access to everything we need, including fantastic nature right outside our homes.  Our system is democratic, consensus-oriented, and with the highest levels of trust in the world.

These are all fantastic prerequisites when it comes to building the World’s #1 Sustainability Country - of course we can make this happen. But it requires collaborative effort and systemic change, and therefore we have identified three key areas within sustainability that needs to improve and that we will focus our work on to improve our collective leadership and action-taking abilities in this field:

• Lack of knowledge - the general levels of knowledge of sustainable business is too low
• Lack of community - there is leading community for people interested in sustainable business in Norway
• Lack of overview/collaboration - there is no leading organization/platform that provides overview of this field in Norway

Our collective passion

Our founders and crowdfounders are extremely passionate about combining business with purpose. We’re millennials, and we don’t work just to make a living. The bigger reason we go to work every day is to make a difference, for our generation and the next generations to come. We want to use our professional careers to help build better and more sustainable businesses, cities, communities and a better world alongside others with the same passion.

And - we have been waiting for years for a business minded sustainability community to arise here in Norway. We don’t want to wait anymore, so we decided to build such an initiative ourselves and start by mobilizing the grassroots. We’ve named it Sustainability Hub Norway - and we want to be the leading Norwegian community and platform for sustainable business and leadership.

We believe in collaboration, in sharing, in deep knowledge. That is why we are setting this up as a hub, a platform - with a strong focus on partnerships. We don’t have all the answers by ourselves - but we think that we are extremely strong together, as a community. Let’s all lead the way and move Norway into the #1 sustainability country in the world.

      Be the change,
      Andreas Friis
      Co-Founder, Chairman and Chief Architect