The Nest Climate Campus during NY Climate Week.
Nest Climate Campus
While Climate Week may be behind us, the Nest Climate Campus, which was the epicenter of all things climate-related in New York this September, has been years in the making. Seasoned entrepreneur Britton Jones is behind this venture: he founded NXT Events Media Group to be a purpose-driven producer of events dedicated to making the world a better place.
Early in 2020, NXT Events became the producers of The Nest, an event that was conceived by the Javits Center and NYC & Company (now New York City Tourism & Conventions) to create a unifying venue during Climate Week.
This year, they were able to bring together almost 9,500 climate leaders, from business, NGOs, government, academia, and media.
Jones shares a bit about the journey of building this common space — and one that’s oriented towards solutions, not just more chatter. If you couldn’t make it there in person, many of the week’s conversations and events are now available online, which Jones hopes will reach an even wider audience and serve as a resource as businesses aim to implement some of the solutions featured on the campus.
Esha Chhabra: Why are you doing this at this point in your career? You certainly don’t have to have.
Britton Jones: My family jokes about my semi-retirement regularly. And I tell people that I’m failing at retirement.
And happily so. You know, I think everybody reaches a point in their life. Well, not everybody, but, you know, when I exited my family company, I knew that I wasn’t done.
Britton Jones, Founder and CEO of the Nest Climate Campus in New York.
Britton Jones
I felt like there was so much more that interests me and that I wanted to do. And I really felt like I wanted to expand the role in which I could try and give back and try and help make the world a better place. There’s so many challenges in the world we live in today.
And so that was the reason to start a purpose-driven events company. There aren’t really any. And I thought that it would be a really valuable and satisfying thing to try and create, by using the resources, talent, and expertise that my team I and my team have, to try and make a difference in the world and try and empower other people to make a difference in the world.
What does a purpose-driven events company look like in your mind? How would you define it? Is it doing events that are primarily around sustainability, or is it also the way you’ve structured the company?
I had a natural interest in sustainability because I’m a big outdoorsman. I’m an avid skier, and I love the water, and my family does. We spend a lot of time on the water in the summer and in the mountains in the winter. And it was very clear to me that the world around us was changing.
So sustainability was a key interest. But I also am chairman of the board of a nonprofit called Food Rescue U.S., which has a dual mission. It’s feeding the food insecure and saving the planet by keeping food waste out of landfill where it converts to methane.
The Nest Climate Campus brought together over 9,000 leaders across industries this year.
Nest Climate Campus
So it was an area that I already had a keen interest in and a pretty deep involvement in. The brainchild of Nest was really the CEO of the Javits Center, a gentleman by the name of Alan Steele, who has really transformed the Javits Center from a traditional convention center into one of the world’s greenest convention centers with one of the largest green roofs in America. All the solar panels, the orchard, the farm, and probably one of the most sophisticated battery storage centers in New York, if not the United States.
I, in a former life, was the second largest user of the Javits Center. Now the Javits Center, well, NYC & Company, had served on their sustainability council and on their events council. So I was a known entity.
That’s where the idea originally came from. I wanted key stakeholders to have a sustainable and rewarding business, but we really went into this to generate impact. I think so many event organizers look at something and say, how much money can I make? And the profit margins in event organization can be very high.
And I would say a lot of the events industry is really motivated by money, and we looked at this and said, you know what? I looked at a bunch of things, and some of them could have been quite lucrative, but this was something where we felt we could really generate impact because there was a lot of room for improvement in Climate Week.
So walk me through the timeline. When did you start this venture, and how long has it taken you to create it?
What we experienced this year was the clearest expression of our original vision when we started, and it is a building process.
So we started at the really opportune time of March of 2020. Our first meeting with the Javits Center and NYC & Company was to happen in person, and it didn’t. It was a Zoom meeting because the city had started shutting down. And so we started then.
One of the things I did right from the start was I reached out to the climate group, the organizers of Climate Week NYC, and said, “Here’s a vision that we have, and I want to make sure you’re on board with this.”
I want to be a partner of yours, not with any financial arrangement, but I want to be accretive to what you have started, and here’s how I view how what we could do would truly be complimentary. And they liked the concept.
They had been trying to bring people together through 900 meetings scattered around the city, so there was a desire on their part to express this as a community. What we wanted to do was create a place where the community would truly come together in person.
So you did your first in-person event amidst the pandemic?
Yes, we ran our first in-person version of this in 2021, right in the height of the Delta time of COVID, and I think we had maybe about 300 people there.
And everybody who was there was masked and staying in their own pod. Nobody wanted to interact with other people, so it was a really bizarre time to be running an in-person event. But since then, it’s grown substantially.
One of the frustrations with climate conferences has been that it feels like a lot of talk. But where’s the action?
Exhibit at the Nest Climate Campus.
Nest Climate Campus
Yes. I hear you. We really started as a conference, but a conference not so much focused on conversation. I really wanted to, right from the get-go, I wanted to make this as broad and inclusive and diverse a group as we could. We believe that climate solutions are an all-hands-on-deck situation, that it shouldn’t be the realm of the privileged and the largest Fortune 500 companies talking to each other.
And that’s what we saw. We saw in the industry a lot of really siloed events with high entry admission prices, which attract the same 500 or 600 people over and over and over again, or non-profits holding meetings, and they were looking for free meeting space because they don’t have budgets for holding meetings in places like the Javits Center. And that’s why Climate Week was really spread all over the city and splintered into smaller meetings happening all over the place.
So tell me, this year though, if you were to look at it, what would you say were some of the key takeaways from this year’s event? Did you feel like there was some tangible result?
So first of all, we’re really only focused on solutions. We don’t want people coming and talking about their 2050 plans. That doesn’t interest us at all.
The focus of the Nest Climate Campus is really on actionable, real-world solutions. What are people doing today that makes a difference, and how can that be food for thought for other sustainability leaders? What can they hear that they can then put to work in their organization? So we use the word campus very intentionally, because if you think about our main stage, which is more our conference where people demonstrate climate solutions, those are like our lecture classes. We had 40 co-hosted events going on on the campus, going everywhere from the UN GC Leadership Summit, which they held at the Javits Center as part of the campus, to WWF, the Nature Conservancy, S&P Sustainable One.
Then we launched something in a big way this year that really makes a big difference, and that was called the Climate Collective. And its activations.
It’s where people bring their solutions. It’s not a trade show, but it’s where people bring their solutions and their expertise on display on the floor of the Javits Center.
Plus, we had an area committed to Green Jobs. We definitely wanted specific solutions on display.
What’s next?
We are starting to get asked about launching pop-up events or additional activities throughout the year. And we want to serve our community throughout the year. Climate solutions should not be a once-a-year focus.
They should be an everyday focus. And we’re not going to run an event every day, but we’re looking at ways that we can expand our services to help the climate community advance and accelerate climate solutions on an ongoing basis.
Its become easy to be come disenchanted with the climate space because we seem to be making progress very slowly. Are you still hopeful?
Yes, I’m very hopeful. I can see the really positive work that so many different organizations are doing, but one has to remain mindful as to the urgency of what we are doing and how we need to. We all need to, and this is something that we feel is so important on the campus, is to include content, sessions, and information that are meaningful to people, that people can actually put to work no matter where they are personally or as an organization in their climate journey.
If you’re an entrepreneur just starting out, we want you to have tools and resources that can help you. If you’re the CSO of a major corporation, we want you to have content and information that energizes, inspires, and empowers people.
But I think the thing that’s really going to change is creating this culture, this mindset that, you know, what I’m doing may seem insignificant, but if everybody takes what seems like insignificant action, we can make a significant difference. And the last thing I’ll say about it is I think Churchill had it right when he said, “America has the innate ability to do the right thing only after we consider every other alternative.”
And I think when it comes to climate, we have considered almost every other alternative. It’s time for action. We need to do what we can.