President’s Message

To our valued SENFC members,

Our fiscal year started July 1, 2024. There were many wonderful initiatives we were involved in last year that are propelling us into our new year. I am honored to lead this organization as the new Board President. I get the opportunity to work with an extremely passionate group of people who volunteer their time and talent to be on our board of directors. Each having a very unique role in the event industry but all share the same goal to create a place where our members can come to learn, collaborate and make real change to produce sustainable events. 

The trend we are seeing is that more and more event organizers know the importance of creating sustainable events, they just need to know how. We have moved the narrative from "Why create sustainable events" to " How to create sustainable events". As they say "the tides are changing" .  We are moving in the right direction, however, there is still much work to be done. Our goal at SENFC is to connect, continue educating and keep our members informed. We want to be a resource to come and get easy, practical information to create sustainable events. We are working on a sustainable tool kit that will help anyone in the industry to produce a sustainable event. Very similar to our "Food Rescue as easy as 1, 2, 3" guide. 

We are also working closely with other event industry associations to provide joint in person sustainable education sessions. This is a great way to collaborate and get the opportunity to meet in person, face-to-face, which we know is important to our members.

At the end of the day our organization is only as strong as its member. I encourage you to get involved. If it is to write an article for our newsletter, post on our social media platforms or help with an education session, just get involved. Feel free to reach out directly to me at mschmidhofer@gmcvb.com. I would love to hear from you and connect you to a committee.

I am thrilled and excited for the upcoming year. As they say, stay tuned more to come!

Warm regards,

Marianne Schmidhofer
Volunteer SENFC President 2024/25