Meet a Member: Göker Avcı
Every week we’re delighted to meet the new people joining our growing community of purpose driven professionals. Most recently, a member we’ve become acquainted with has been Göker Avcı, the founder of Alalëa Social Innovation and Sustainable Development Consulting.
“Some of our focus points are CO2 footprint reduction, renewable energy, carbon credits, zero-waste and social impact. I built sustainability strategies for corporate companies and manage their activation processes. Also, I’m currently involved in 30+ carbon credits project.”
An exciting development is that Alalëa is building a new start-up called “Covalent Climate Tech, Inc.” in San Francisco! At Covalent a carbon compensation platform is being built for companies to calculate, track and offset carbon footprint of their operations, using an all-in-one dashboard via API integration.
Göker joined BoP because he believes in mutual value creation.
Professionals who concentrate on purpose-driven businesses have a common liability to continuously enlarge their impact zone. It is significantly important to follow global current affairs and share experiences together to transit to a sustainable World. On behalf of it, we are looking for early-stage fundraising and potential future collaboration opportunities at Covalent. High-impact nature-based project developers will be able to join our platform and hand over all their verification process to us. Therefore, I’m also in search of possible frontier projects to issue carbon credits in cooperation.”
According to him, the biggest concern in business today is profitability. He expands that because it is placed at such high value, sustainability is consequently treated as a “nice to have” focus.
“All they care about is reducing costs and increasing revenues by extending their operations. This approach has caused us a climate crisis which does not have a rapid solution. Companies do not feel responsibility on keeping earth resources safe. If they do not change their direction, they may be the first to suffer due to the lack of resources. Water scarcity, forest fires and drought will make it harder to reach raw materials. Hopefully, companies will realize that this is a road of no return and start taking climate action immediately.”
When asked why purpose-driven businesses are the future, Göker explains that a lot of it has to do with Gen-Z, who he describes as the most questioning and sensitive generation to date.
“Their consumption habits have a tendency to switch brands according to the environmental & social claim. In a couple of years, high rate of workforce will consist of Gen-Z members. I strongly believe they will improve company operations in an environmental-friendly way. They will convert the financial concerns of companies to a ‘financial-social hybrid approach’. Due to the increasing pressure from consumers, businesses will have to enter into a sustainable path to satisfy the expectations.”
Want to support Göker on his entrepreneurial journey and exchange resources? Connect with him on LinkedIn! Found here.
