Today I spent Outdoor Office Day in the Amsterdam Forest.

Tamara van Witzenburg and Ioana Biris invited me to take part in the Wanderwalk with a Sustainable Leader. I used the opportunity to talk with various sustainability-minded thinkers about my research topic, Social Green, while walking appr. 13 km.

2.3 km with Seb Baneke
I had a highly engaging talk with Seb, co-founder of BounceBee, about their mission to redefine travel by making it more sustainable. They organize group trips for companies without using planes, promoting a mindful approach to mobility. Their biggest challenge is changing people’s mindset and habits – away from fast, efficient, faraway travel just to tick boxes.

2.2 km with Iris Visser
Iris Visser is a social geographer and natural capital analyst at Nature Squared, where she develops sustainable financial concepts for governments, companies, and NGOs. Whether it’s green finance, sustainable supply chains, or landscape regeneration, the key challenge is creating programs that aren’t dependent on highly profitable revenue models.
Currently, Iris is working on designing a concept for a sustainable mortgage. The main hurdle – the still-conventional mindset of banks, which continue to prioritize risk minimization and old financing models – despite our lived reality having already moved forward.
An eye-opening conversation.

2.3 km with Chantal van Binsbergen
The creative strategist shared her approach to helping organizations foster sustainable growth. She believes that most people agree on the need for a sustainable future, so she avoids blame-driven narratives and instead focuses on creating sustainable solutions at different organizational levels. A compelling conversation – Chantal’s relentless optimism was truly contagious.

2.1 km with Karin Stoevenbeld-Kreber
Karin, an entrepreneur and Climate Coach, acts on the belief that “you only need 25% of your team to actually implement sustainable change in your business.” She once transformed her own company before selling it and now teaches others how to reduce their footprint and increase their handprint – their positive impact on other people. In her role as a Climate Coach, she uses tools from behavioral psychology to help people have effective conversations that lead to change. Honestly, I think everyone should learn this methodology.

2.4 km with Charlie Peel
Charlie is a passionate advocate for urban social and environmental transformation. He played a key role in making London the world’s first National Park City, designing a green-blue map to showcase the city’s natural heritage. The map was so successful in reshaping how people viewed the city through a nature-first lens that similar projects followed in Edinburgh, Glasgow and in cooperation with Nature Desks in Amsterdam and Breda.

2 km with The Amsterdamse Bos Ranger
We learned that the forest was planted by forced labour, with every tree placed in the ground by hand. Along the way, we discovered tiny baby frogs and listened to the wind rustling through the trees.

My resolution after this inspiring day: to spend more time working outdoors!

Follow the progress of my research on Social Green on Instagram.