Guest blog – Independent greens by Marina Pacheco

Is it time to promote more independent greens?

I define an indie-green as anyone who is passionate about a green issue and wants to set up their own project as a sole trader or someone who starts up a social enterprise, business or charity. There are plenty of examples of people who have set up fantastic projects on their own and I believe we can both learn from them and encourage more people to do the same. I have been interviewing indie-greens for the last 18 months, learning about how they started and what they do to keep themselves funded. That and my own experience has convinced me that it is easier now than in the past for people to set up this way and I believe that it should be encouraged.

The world of work is changing

I’ve been working for 25 years and I feel the changes to working life that are taking place now are more profound than they’ve ever been. Automation means that thousands of traditional jobs have been lost. Manual jobs were the first to be automated but there is an ever expanding list of jobs that are now susceptible to automation. This includes sectors that were previously immune such as some work carried out by nurses and lawyers. http://www.eng.ox.ac.uk/about/news/new-study-shows-nearly-half-of-us-jobs-at-risk-of-computerisation

On the other side, the internet and social media is producing new ways of working that we can tap into to create new and different jobs. The internet startups were at the forefront of this trend and created a plethora of new work, much of it around the gig economy that gives people an opportunity to pick up work as and when it suits them. This still leaves people at the mercy of the company founders but people have also started figuring out how to use the internet to create their own jobs. This is just as well because it looks like more and more people will be working freelance in the future. The statistics for the USA are that over half the working population will be freelance by 2020. That’s not very far off.

How we currently do green work

Up till now we have mainly relied upon government and charities to do green work for us. Looking at the outcomes it is clear that what is being done isn’t enough to reverse the declines we are seeing. I’m not blaming anyone, the problem is massive, human beings have been wiping out wildlife and altering their environment since the Stone Age. It is an enormous problem to try and solve and we have a better chance of doing it if we get more people involved.

History tells us it is seldom the establishment that creates anything new anyway. It’s the upstarts and interlopers that are disruptors to the system and who take the next leap forward. I believe now is an ideal time to encourage people to take their future into their own hands and go for it.

Plenty of people want to go green

We don’t have a shortage of interest. Tens of thousands of environmental students graduate every year. These students have a passion for the subject and a real drive to make

a difference. Unfortunately, when they hit the working world, they discover how tough it is to get into the green sector. Many land up volunteering for a year or more before they get their first job and in the conservation sector those jobs are poorly paid, fixed term and, increasingly, part-time.

Aside from the students, I have met many mid-life career changers who would also like to move to a job that they find more meaningful or simply feel compelled to do something about the state of the planet. Many of them don’t have formal qualifications in the sector but are keen to learn. I’ve met a few who’ve successfully made the switch too, age and previous experience shouldn’t be a bar.

What it takes to become an indie-green

Willingness to learn new skills. In the last two and a half years I’ve learned more than I have in the last 25. I’ve learned about internet start-ups (I initially set up a freelancers jobs board), website entrepreneurship and Lean development, blogging, social media, online training, sales funnels, content marketing, book writing and the world of solopreneurs. I looked over the environment sector wall into the internet business world, coaching and the creative sector and I realised they have plenty to teach us.

An independent mindset. We need to break free from the idea that we have to wait for an official organisation to give us a job before we can do anything. If you are going to spend a year or more working part-time in a bar while volunteering for a charity hoping they will give you a job, why not spend that time working part-time and setting up your own project where you will be guaranteed a job?

You need an understanding of niche marketing. In the past, if you provided a service or a product, once you had saturated your local market you had nowhere else to go. Now, you can reach out to the whole world and find your niche, the people with the same interests as you who are willing to follow you and buy from you wherever they are in the world. People who love volleyball, cookery, lifestyle coaching and writing books have discovered that there are enough people out in the world interested in the same things as them that they can make a living from their passion by harnessing the power of the internet. There is no reason at all that green topics can’t enter those ranks. If I look at the activity taking place around plastic use and reduction in my local community, I can see that people care, want to take action, and will support anyone who takes the lead.

The ability to set up passive income streams. Many green charities and social enterprises part fund their work through the delivery of courses, for example. It’s a good way to bring in additional income. The problem with a live course though is that you’re trading time for money, time developing and delivering the course that you can’t use for anything else. But webinars and online courses are becoming increasingly popular and easily accessible, and the tech for delivery is surprisingly straightforward. It is now possible to set up a course, do the work once, and aside from marketing, leave it to run in the background and generate passive income. Doing green work itself might not generate an income, but if you can create funding streams around what you do, the profit can be ploughed back into the project and into supporting the indie-green.

Get out there and do something green

Rather than trying to shut aspirations down and funnelling people into a tiny pool of traditional jobs in the green sector, I believe we should be encouraging more people to find their own solutions and create their own jobs. As a way of supporting this, I have created a cheat sheet of all the means of generating funds I have come across, money is the main obstacle stopping most people from getting started after all. It’s a free download and you can get it here: http://seesjobs.com/funding-cheatsheet/. I have also got a website filled with articles aimed at helping people who’d like to set up their own projects, www.seesjobs.com. I would love to hear if you think we should be encouraging indie-greens and if you have any success stories or ways of working that you’d like to share. You can contact me at [email protected]

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