soulincubator: Experience report by Laura Grotenrath • Zero Waste Your Festival
With her initiative Zero Waste Your Life, Laura is committed to a world without plastic. Through various educational offerings, she has been able to introduce small groups of students and adults to a sustainable lifestyle. But she and her team also want to make a difference on a larger scale: With Zero Waste Your Festival, she is founding a festival consultancy that makes plastic-free large-scale events possible. In this blog, she tells us about her plans and how the soulincubator helped to implement them.
“You have set yourself a lot of goals”
When I started the Zero Waste Your Life project at the beginning of 2018, I initially had a big vision. I wanted to give zero waste workshops for students and adults, share my expertise with as many people as possible online and rid Germany's festival landscape of waste. When I told friends and acquaintances about it, a common reaction was: "You've set yourself a lot of goals" or even the skeptical question: "How are you going to do that?" Fortunately, I also often encountered encouraging words and helpful tips for getting started. At the time, I was still in the middle of my master's degree and had little knowledge of practical entrepreneurship. I was all the more grateful when a friend later recommended the ProjectTogether community to me.
Challenge of starting a business part-time
What can I say? It was love at first sight. My wonderful coach Heidi systematically helped me plan the next steps . Since then, Zero Waste Your Life's educational offerings have reached more than 500 children, young people and adults across Germany, raised almost 10,000 euros for charitable crowdfunding and currently reach several thousand people every day on social media. I always had the Zero Waste Your Festival project in mind during this time, but struggled to implement it. The critical factors were time and money . Earning money as a freelance sustainability speaker was doable thanks to my existing contacts. Finding the time to build up a large company in a completely new field of activity at the same time was difficult.
Growth through coaching and contacts
That's why the call for applications for the Act on Plastic Challenge in late summer 2019 came at just the right time. 101 projects that are developing solutions to the plastic problem on our planet were to be networked with each other and individually supported in Phase I of the soulincubator . That was exactly what the Zero Waste Your Festival project needed. At the kick-off event in Berlin, I made valuable contacts with other project founders. Together with my coach Roland, I developed strategies to advance Zero Waste Your Festival alongside ongoing freelance assignments. From October 2019 to March 2020, we met every two weeks for a video call . Roland asked me constructive questions, shared his entrepreneurial knowledge with me, and reminded me to always celebrate the small and large successes along the way. In addition to the coaching, meetings with experts from the ProjectTogether network on topics such as positioning, business plans, and impact measurement also helped. So the vision of a festival consultancy gradually became a tangible goal and the one-woman show became a team.
When the application for Phase II of the soulincubator started, my colleague Arne and I knew that we wanted to be part of it - and we were successful . We are very grateful to the soulincubator, consisting of ProjectTogether and soulbottles, for their support based on the motto "prove instead of advertise." Since the beginning of April 2020, we have been learning together with a total of 34 people from 13 prospective companies in workshops and in personal exchanges what successful, social and sustainable entrepreneurship can mean and how it works.
support at all levels
Although we have not yet been able to meet in the coworking space set up for Phase II at soulbottles in Berlin due to the corona pandemic , I already feel a strong connection with the group. The soulincubator is supporting us with the appropriate resources for another six months until September. The financial support from the soulincubator scholarship gives us the opportunity to advance the Zero Waste Your Festival project full-time . Individual coaching and expert workshops help us to grow personally and as a company in the process of being founded. The exchange with the other founders via Slack, during virtual community breakfasts and personal video calls is good. What unites us are big visions and a drive for action.
