Voiz: Gen-Zs Demanding a Shift into Corporate Sustainability

By Summer Wyatt-Buchan, Alexandra Nikolin and Hannah Harrison

Voiz is a sustainability venture founded in 2020 by Yvonne Espinosa, Diego Espinosa, and Victoria Trujillo Onodera, which pushes for young people to be heard by businesses and for more progressive corporate sustainability. Voiz was built on the knowledge that if we want a sustainable planet, young people cannot be asked to wait their turn, they need to take a seat at the table today.

Most people’s time at Voiz begins with an 8 week-long sustainability analyst internship. However, Voiz is much more than just an internship; we are a movement. Read on to learn more about what Voiz believes in, as well as the opportunities all Gen-Z’s who push through Voiz’s (virtual) doors encounter: 

Voiz as a DAO

Voiz is the first-ever campus-native Decentralised Autonomous Organisation (DAO). But what is a DAO? A DAO is an organisation that is owned, led and shared by a community, without any sort of centralised executive leadership. In many ways, DAOs are like coops: driven by democratic decision-making (in the case of Voiz, we use this to decide who is chosen to become a  team lead – in other words, to help guide each cohort of interns). Our decentralised nature and self-governance ensure that making a difference at Voiz, once you have joined us, is really easy!

For this reason we plan to be the first DAO to spread across university campuses globally. We are looking for blockchain enthusiasts to help us design and build our DAO. You might be a business, computer science or design student but of course, we hope you are also passionate about the planet’s future like we are. 

Below we will introduce you to the different teams that create impact for Voiz:

Brands and Partners Team

It is the job of the brands and partners team to build and manage the growing network of sustainable businesses engaging with Voiz through finding and maintaining connections with companies and organisations, including university campuses, that share Voiz’s core values. Brands may reach out to be reviewed, or the team may reach to try and establish a relationship with a sustainable company or help an organisation become more environmentally conscious. Partnerships can take many different forms including social media promotion, carbon calculation workshops, being featured as a speaker on the podcast or at a summit, or simply being rated on their overall sustainability. 

All of our past speaker series can be found on our YouTube channel and our podcast.

Editorial Team

The editorial team is responsible for driving engagement, emphasising voice, and driving systematic change internally as well as externally at Voiz. They connect review content to a wider meaning and work closely with the social media team to create engaging posts and relatable content. The editorial team also provides a platform for the Voiz community to write longer articles about their passions in sustainability, as well as informative content about Voiz being a DAO. 

You can check out our articles here.

You can check out our Story Times here.

Social Media Team

The Social Media team works closely with the editorial team, translating content into shareable images and infographics for Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and TikTok. The team is split according to the different social media platforms and focuses on content that will engage those on the specific platform. They make content tailored specifically to engage their platform users whilst ensuring to keep the Voiz voice and corporate accountability. 

Education Team

In June 2021 Voiz launched its first-ever Junior Sustainability Analyst Programme at The Cotswold School, Gloucestershire, England. Here, over a period of 6 weeks, 25 students were taught about SDG 12, life cycle analysis, corporate accountability, and were empowered through writing sustainability reviews. This program prioritised critical thinking and independent learning which is reflected by our student-led discussions on topics ranging from fast fashion to sustainable food to fast technology. Each week our debates were centred on the best ways to hold corporations accountable. Click here to read our high school reviews.

Campus Ambassadors

With students around the world having completed their internship with Voiz, it is now time for them to spread the Voiz mission far and wide! From UCL to NYU, Cambridge to Cornell, Voiz’s campus ambassadors are responsible for establishing societies at their respective universities. Once formed, they are responsible for hosting events, vetting their university on ESG factors, and recruiting the next batch of interns!

Summits

Bringing together all the behind-the-scenes work done by the Voiz teams are the summits. Sustainability summits are week-long virtual events focusing on a specific industry that, through panel discussions and interviews, allow the industry to be explored in depth from a sustainability perspective. The summits bring together Gen-Z and businesses at the forefront of their industry to discuss the main sustainability challenges and, more importantly, what is being done to tackle them. Past sustainability summits have covered topics from surfing to fashion. Many exciting summits, such as the Sustainable Finance Summit hosted by the University of Cambridge and the Sustainable Food Summit hosted by University College London, are yet to come. The Voiz team is in charge of organising the summits and also moderates the discussions. Bringing students and corporations face-to-face to discuss the planet’s pressing issues and what can be done is what makes Voiz so unique. 

Interested to join us? You can read more about Voiz here; sign up and get involved today, we look forward to having you as part of our community! 

Alexandra, Summer and Hannah are all Voiz Alumni, having completed the internship in 2020 (Summer) and 2021 (Alexandra and Hannah). They all have stayed on at Voiz, with Summer now acting as Director of Digital Content as well as leading the Voiz UCL Chapter; Alexandra as a member of the Brands and Partners Team and Hannah as one of the executive members of Cambridge’s Voiz Chapter.