As many of you know, I’ve been studying sustainability & climate risk over the last 2 years. In February and March, I passed various milestones on my journey from mainly Learning & Development-based work to more Sustainability & Climate Risk-based work.
Throughout this period
• I became an Accredited Advisor for the Future-Fit Foundation, to use their Future-Fit Business Benchmark tool—still the only tool that measures ‘absolute’ progress towards sustainability, and
• I became a BSI Tutor with BSI Singapore. This standards organisation, established by Royal Charter some 100 years ago, is renowned the world over for helping businesses of all industries define what they do and how they do it.
While I will continue to trade as the sole proprietor McEwan Ewan Duncan, I have established a brand under which I will promote my new work. This brand is First Resource SG®️, a registered trademark with the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore, IPOS.
I am now looking for some help in finding people in 3 areas:
• clients to take up our offer,
• business partners to complement our offer, and
• suppliers to help build our offer.
If you or anyone you know can help with this, please do get in touch.
We plan to help companies, whether they are listed, SMEs, MNCs or private companies, to move towards an environmentally restorative, socially just and economically inclusive world—a world where humans, animals, plants and fungi can thrive on Earth together forever.
My journey to make this change was initially inspired by Dave Borlace and his YouTube channel Just Have A Think! and Just Have Another Think! Here is a link:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRBwLPbXGsI2cJe9W1zfSjQ/about
I realised that although I had read many reports—Corporate Responsibility Reports, Sustainability Reports and Social Responsibility Reports—I didn’t actually know what many of the terms meant. Searching the internet, I came across Professor Michael E. Mann’s course on Climate Science & Modelling on the highly respected edX learning platform.
edX is an online learning platform developed by a consortium of some of the top-league universities. I would highly recommend completing the course. Details here:
https://www.edx.org/course/climate-change-the-science-and-global-impact
I was so taken with my experience online learning that I decided to get skilled in designing such courses myself. Again, looking around and discussing the best system to learn with clients and colleagues, I concluded that Gnowbe was the best programme platform.
Gnowbe is straightforward to learn and easy to use to curate fantastically engaging learning and performance support programmes. The reason I chose Gnowbe in particular is simple: it is specifically designed, from the bottom up, to be used on smartphones.
We did an analysis with one of my largest clients and we worked out that some one-third of their people didn’t have access to a desk-top/lap-top computer, but they did have access to smartphones. So, this was an easy decision to make.
I qualified as a Microlearning Instructional Designer and signed up as an Ambassador for Gnowbe. Details here:
https://www.gnowbe.com/
Realising that future assignments (at least in-person ones) are more likely to involve local and national rather than international deliveries, I also decided to get qualified to work in the local market of Singapore. This involved completing an Advanced Certificate in Learning & Performance offered by the Institute of Adult Learning, Singapore.
The ACLP is made up of 6 modules and a choice of 2 electives, and, most importantly, includes an accreditation of a prior learning assessment element. Through this highly efficient and valuable process, I was accredited with all modules except one, which I gladly completed.
Details of the ACLP here:
https://www.ial.edu.sg/
First Resource SG®️ offers 4 core capabilities:
– Learning Solutions, Design, Development and Deployment in Sustainability & Climate Risk,
– Materiality Assessment using the Future-Fit Foundation’s Future-Fit Business Benchmark Tool,
– Strategy Integration and Business Remodelling around Sustainability & Climate Risk impact, and
– Strategic Communications, including Reporting, for ESG & Sustainability & Climate Risk.
On Monday 11 April, we launched Phase 1 of our website. In this phase, the website will be used as a landing page with some additional functionality. The site will be used to promote and engage in our chosen markets and build awareness of our products and services.
We look forward to working with clients, partners, suppliers and agencies to further the work towards sustainability and a future that consists of an environmentally restorative, socially just and economically inclusive world—a world where humans, animals, plants and fungi can thrive on earth together, forever.
Ewan McEwan
Co-Founder
First Resource SG®️
April 2022
First Resource SG® 