Someday

REFLECTIONS ON THE FUTURE

My stage fright overtakes me. I can’t remember where I am, let alone what I am supposed to speak about. I’m in a room with 800 people sitting at round tables sipping coffee and eating croissants and pastries. It’s 2030, and conferences still don’t offer granola, yogurt and oatmeal for breakfast? The croissant eaters are all here to hear me speak about resilience, about the power we all have to do big things – to make a positive change in the world. I take a deep breath and start using some of the relaxation methods my coach and I have been practicing. I begin to feel the strength that brought me to this point and I am suddenly rid of the knots and the shakes in my stomach. I can do this. Damn it, picture them all in their underwear. I get up on stage and start telling my story:

“Hi, I’m Gia Machlin. I’m 66 years old and I am living my best life ever. Ten years ago, climate scientists said we had 10 years left before climate change would become irreversible. And here we are, better off than we were 10 years ago and facing a brighter future for our kids. Ten years ago, we had more plastic in our oceans than fish. Air pollution was the 4^th largest risk factor for premature death. Today, in 2030, many of those grim statistics are a thing of the past. Whether or not I had any miniscule part in making this happen is irrelevant. What matters is that I believed in a better future.

In 2020, being a sustainability professional was a tough place to exist. Day in and day out we would immerse ourselves in the enormous damage humanity was wreaking on our only home, Planet Earth. As the child of a Holocaust survivor, someone with severe clinical depression, and a person who grew up in a family that was angry at the world, I kind of had the cards stacked against me. Yes, I was white, educated, and raised in privileged surroundings, but otherwise had a lot of work to do to not give in to hopelessness and despair about the future…”

I go on to speak about all the high highs and low lows in my life – and how each experience made me stronger and more resilient: How losing a best friend to suicide at 20 taught me to take my own mental illness struggles seriously and seek help. How getting laid off from my cushy corner office telecom job led me to land my dream job as a management consultant at a prestigious consulting firm. And how almost suffering a nervous breakdown from all the travel and stress in that job led me to start my own consulting firm.

The crowd indulges me to continue on: “A few years later, on the same day that I gave birth to my first child, I started a health care software company that quickly grew to $5 million in revenue. At age 35, I was on top of the world with a young family, an amazing staff and wonderful company that I had built from scratch.

And then I lost it all. The devastating aftereffects of 9/11 put my business partner and me at odds with one another. My mom suffered a debilitating stroke, and I was pregnant with my second child. My partner and I eventually split ways after a long struggle over the company. He bought me out for small change and I moved on. Two years later, he sold the company for an obscene amount of money – none of which came to me.”

I can hear sighs from the audience, as they quickly relate to my story about being so close…and yet just missing the jackpot. I continue, “That was the beginning of a brutal stretch of a different kind of highs and lows, the kind that goes along with caring for a sick aging parent while raising young kids and trying to start yet another business. After picking myself up off the floor from losing my business and missing out on the pay day, I wanted to do something more meaningful. I had two young kids and I wanted a better world for them. So I started sustainably minded EcoPlum in 2007 and launched my website in the fall of 2008. You all know what happened in the fall of 2008…

There were losses and celebrations, and many years of dealing with my mom’s declining health and too many hospitalizations to count and nights in the ICU where my mom would be the only patient to recover from intubation, where her survivor instincts from the war kept her fighting until the very end. By the time my mom died in 2019 and COVID came along in 2020, I felt as though I had weathered so many storms that I just would say – bring it on – knock me down 15 times and I’ll get up 16 times!

So here I am, living my best life ever. My non-profit, Sustainable Sisters, has raised over $100 million to help empower women to make choices that have helped slow climate change through education, family planning, and independence.

With our acquisition of Zox, a company that provides turnkey company stores, EcoPlum Business Gifts is now the leading provider of Sustainable Swag® solutions world wide. Hard to believe that only 10 years ago there was a $22 billion promotional products industry selling primarily cheap products made from virgin plastic. In 2030, it’s funny to even think that companies used to do that, with no regard for the consequences or the enormous contribution to plastic waste that can take  up to1000 years to decompose. In fact, when I first started talking to the folks at Zox in 2020, they had absolutely no plans to stop selling the cheap plastic items and $2 t-shirts while they ignored the true cost of the labor and externalities associated with producing these inexpensive items. So when EcoPlum acquired them in 2025, and required that all their products meet our strict sustainability criteria, it was quite sweet.

Remember when ten years ago, companies were accountable only to their shareholders? Being accountable to other stakeholders, such as employees, the community, the environment, and society was a thing reserved for B-corporations – which were still few and far between in 2020. Now all companies are required to meet these social justice, environmental, and governance requirements and it seems inconceivable that companies were, not long ago, allowed to pollute and discriminate with little to no consequences. And all of this, all of it happened because people believed that we could make a positive change. I know I continued to believe and see the best in people and society and to never stay down when I got knocked over and to know that no matter what life brings, there is always a new day.”

I take another deep breath, and I head back to my table to eat my croissant.

Gia Machlin wrote this in January 2021. She is the President & CEO of EcoPlum. EcoPlum helps organizations showcase their brand and their values with its Sustainable Swag(r) line of promotional products. EcoPlum is on a mission to help buyers make responsible choices on their branded gifts, while reducing the amount of plastic and other harmful waste filling up our landfills and oceans. Gia is also the founder of Sustainable Sisters (tm), a non-profit that brings together women business owners with impactful climate change solutions driven by empowering women.