Sarah Tulej

Background

I’m a sustainability advisor, working in the sustainable business and food teams.  The projects I take on are all about helping leading businesses go further and learn from each other, so they can innovate and create truly sustainable business models.  I also work on projects that tackle sustainability challenges in the food system, along the whole value chain.

I started my career at Rochdale Council in the sustainability team, encouraging kids to walk and cycle to school – no mean feat.  I then departed to work in the world of urban regeneration, working for the government and finding myself in situations from digging bore holes in the Liverpool Docks to meeting Boris’s team at City Hall to puzzle over housing policy. Bore holes aside, I realised my heart lay in sustainability and I was sure there must be a more creative and inspiring way to go about creating change than I had yet experienced.  So, I took the plunge and completed the Forum’s MA in Leadership for Sustainable Development, combining academic study with real business experience (including stints at TUI Travel and Delhaize Group).  Not satisfied with just one year immersed in sustainability, I joined the Forum team in autumn 2012, keen to use and build on my experience working on complex multi stakeholder projects to solve some of the many sustainability challenges on the horizon.

My ideal project? One where I get to co-design and facilitate creative sessions for diverse groups of people and organisations, helping them to build robust sustainability strategies.  I’d also like to work on innovative projects that turn these strategies into tangible outcomes, and really see them come to fruition.  I’m fascinated by new business models that allow people to swap, share and come together, and how they can build social capital as well as reducing resource use. 

What floats my boat outside of work? While a little less energetic these days, I love nothing more than dancing all night to a good bit of techno or house music. To offset this habit I am a keen yoga-ist, cyclist and (lapsed, but hopefully not for long) badminton-ist.  I also have an undying urge to attempt learning languages – successfully managing Spanish and French, but rather less so with German, Serbian, Polish and Hungarian…