Dear Reader,

My name is Anita Diószegi, and I am the Residence Manager & Social Secretary at the British Embassy Budapest as well as a member of the Embassy’s Green Team.

Foreign Secretary David Miliband has endorsed an awards scheme for 2009 recognising the impressive advances that are being made across the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) in a number of key areas: leadership, innovation, communication and greening the FCO.

The Budapest Green Team was nominated by our Ambassador and we became one of the best 15 in the Greening the FCO category, and therefore we were invited (with the other 15 nominees in each category) to participate at the Leadership Week in March 2009 in London. I became the lucky one in our team who received this unique opportunity to proudly represent at this occasion.

Part of the prize was that the representative of the team could take part in the whole conference.

The Leadership Week is a conference for Heads of Missions (e.g. Ambassadors), and other leaders of the FCO including two-day stakeholder activity (when the delegates have regional engagements).

Monday

On the first day after a regional meeting of Europe Ambassadors I participated in a lunch for leadership invitees hosted by Mr James Bevan, Director General, Change and Delivery. The guests had the opportunity to get know each other. We, greens had an easy job – thanks to the Greening the FCO team – who wore quite eye-catching green T-shirts and gave out green stickers to the green winners in order to be able to identify each other easily and quickly (and certainly to raise awareness among the others, too).

James Bevan and last year’s winners gave short speeches, and than he and some other senior FCO staff were walking among us and introduced themselves personally.

After the lunch we had an informal discussion with the Sustainable Operations team.

This was a superb opportunity to get know the team, how they work in the FCO, exchange ideas and ask our questions, raise issues, tell about problems, discuss things, check uncertainties, etc. It was also a unique opportunity when we could talk to our African, American, Asian and European "green" colleagues, to identify common problems or differences to help each other with new ideas and brainstorm together.

The meeting gave all of us a very good feeling that there are several people all around the world with the same aim: protect our environment! This meeting had also a close link with another objective of the FCO: diversity. We met very clever, creative and enthusiastic colleagues from Beijing (China), Sao Paulo (Brazil), Tallinn (Estonia), Guatemala City (Guatemala), Hong Kong, Nairobi (Kenya), Seoul (South Korea), Phnom Penh (Cambodia), Quito (Ecuador), Stockholm (Sweden) and the UK.

After this useful meeting we went to the welcome reception and Foreign Secretary’s Awards ceremony - for which we all had been waiting very excitedly in the last weeks.

Mr Peter Ricketts (the most senior civil servant in the FCO) welcomed everyone and congratulated all winners. All of us received our certificates and the winners the trophies from the Foreign Secretary. Though 14 of us have didn’t win, we were all very happy to be there, felt very much appreciated, and we all felt like winners.

The winner was the Green Team in Phnom Penh, Cambodia – which is not the easiest place to green. Their achievements include bringing about substantial year-on-year reductions in electricity and water use.

Tuesday

On the second day, the main conference day all invitees spent the whole day with Ambassadors and other senior FCO staff who attended the conference. There was a welcome speech by Peter Ricketts and speeches by the Foreign Secretary, and the French Foreign Minister, Bernard Kouchner. Different speeches and sessions were held about the future and objectives of the FCO, the global economic crisis and the London G20 Summit.

In the breaks we had the chance to meet colleagues, and we were very impressed and felt appreciated when a lot of ambassadors came to us for a chat and showed great interest in our opinions.

After the conference we went to the networking reception for FCO stakeholders.

This event was jointly hosted by the Foreign Secretary and Peter Ricketts. They wished to bring together 200 of our stakeholders, from business, NGOs, think tanks / academics, faith groups, the media, and Parliament. This reception was also a good opportunity for us to raise green awareness not only in the FCO but also among the partners of the FCO.

Wednesday

On this day we had associated meetings in smaller groups. I took part in the Human Resources, Finance Management, Remote Management meetings and listened to the difficulties of meeting the Millennium Development Goals in an economic downturn. Furthermore there was a ‘Greening the FCO: the role posts can play’ session where we had very interesting speakers such as one of the Carbon Trust Directors, Keith Luck (Environmental Champion on the FCO Board) and Ed Gillespie (Futerra). The Sustainability Team prepared big flipcharts of our achievements to share as best practice. There was also an opportunity for the Ambassadors to ask questions.

Thursday - insider London bespoke tour, personal and professional carbon reduction

On the 4th day our green colleagues in the FCO Sustainability Team arranged a very special “green sightseeing tour” in London for us. The green tour was a tailored tour of sites in London that have been selected to demonstrate their sustainable credentials. The day was a very interesting way to learn more about what is being done to make offices, homes and life in general more sustainable. The tour was led by Vincenzo di Maria, a London-based eco-designer.

We visited a Hub, an innovative shared working space for social entrepreneurs. The Hub’s residents are all personally committed to ethical living, installing energy saving heating, attractive furniture made of recycled materials (e.g. flip chart!). After that we visited a green 5-star hotel – walked through Spitalfields market, saw its innovative ethical shops of Spitalfields, viewing a range of approaches to sustainability. We had a very tasty lunch in a vegan restaurant on a traditional double decker bus. Then we travelled by hybrid cars to the next venue: Britain’s first street with energy saving features on every house. We saw the retrofitted features, heard about the green kitchen redesigns and saw the cycle shed and theatre stage made from railway sleepers. This last one is a very good example of material that can be re-used for nearly nothing… though creative minds found a way of using it.

This week was a great experience for me - it was a superb opportunity for networking and brainstorming and exchanging views and ideas and to “spread the green word”.

Anita Diószegi
6 June 2009