We, the ECo Team, started this journey about a year and a half ago when we understood that we no longer want to follow the corporate world and finally stand up for what we believe in in order to make a dent in the universe.
Coming from different backgrounds, we all shared the same goal: We can no longer accept the status quo and want to be the change for sustainable living that the world needs.
Every beginning is hard. Driven by an intrinsic motivation of how we can empower people to reduce their carbon footprint and respect nature, we just got started.
Initially, we couldn’t understand why many sectors had recently experienced a dramatic increase in innovation, whereas sustainability was still seen as an unprofitable area to do business. Few people actually believed that it could be disrupted through a bottom-up approach, while the majority thought that only big corps and governments had the power to change things through policies and product design.
This was the context in which we decided to make our move. By embracing innovative concepts like co-living and remote work, our idea was to develop a global community of innovators and to change people’s perspective about what sustainable businesses could achieve. That was the motivating idea behind E-Co, a multi-location co-living concept focused on entrepreneurship in the sustainability sector. We were so convinced that we had found the secret recipe to create real change that we just went for it.
Then, we faced a major reality check. We never managed to find a space that could allow us to execute our project and as weeks and months passed, we became more and more convinced that we had failed completely.
What kept us going though, was the fact that even without having the co-living space, we continued to receive interest from entrepreneurs and professionals who wanted to take action and were intrigued by our concept.
We knew that E-Co had potential and realized that we needed to listen more carefully to what people told us. We will always be grateful for the feedback provided by those in our community, and it is largely thanks to them that we found a way to move forward and make our hard work pay off. With the help of advisors, friends and new team members, we decided to start over with a model that was better suited to help us realize our vision.
Thus, ECo (with a slight change in logo and brand name) was born.
We are doing that by developing transformation journeys that can gradually guide both people and businesses towards more conscious daily decision making. We see this as a circular process based on three major steps: LEARN, EXPERIENCE, COCREATE, where the members of the community are gradually empowered to become active initiators of change.
Learning allows us to make better choices and become a bit wiser each day. For this reason, we believe that to be able to make conscious choices when buying or making a product or service, knowledge is the most powerful tool.
The problem is that today we are exposed to an incredible amount of information, making it more difficult to distinguish facts from fiction. In order to fight this problem, we are working on two different levels. First off, we provide structured access to clear information through guides, e-books, webinars and workshops. On the other hand, we are developing a community of people with different skills sets, backgrounds, and ideas to allow a strong and controlled flow of credible and valuable information.
The second step consists of transforming knowledge into action Every day, we have an endless amount of decisions to make. From deciding what to eat for breakfast and how to commute to work, till the moment we go back to sleep, we are constantly making choices, whether we consciously think about them or not.
We can only change our behaviour once we realize that our choices matter. Starting with a few simple steps, such as having a healthier diet, riding a bike to work, or using a stainless-steel water bottle, we can benefit from the positive consequence of making better choices. Through this process, consciousness naturally develops and we start to understand the positive impact of our actions, on both ourselves and the planet. It is just a matter of being open to change.
We finally understood that we can have the biggest impact by working all together. We are facilitating a shift in human behavior, from individualism to communitarianism.
Co-Creation is one of the benefits of this emerging trend. By getting together, trusting one another, and removing cultural barriers, we are able to amplify the magnitude of our impact.
To us, Co-Creation means giving back to the community. Through sharing personal knowledge and experiences, positively influencing local communities, supporting business transition and coming up with innovative ideas — we have the power to change the future.
