isla has announced that four large-scale UK venues have taken up its bespoke venue membership offering in the first quarter of 2023.

ExCeL London, The Science Museum, The Business Design Centre (BDC) and ACC Liverpool have been added to isla’s diverse membership base joining agencies, brands, suppliers in accelerating their journey to event sustainability and net zero.

The news comes just four months after isla launched its sustainability guide for venues, Sustainability in Practice: A Pathway for Venues, created in partnership with VisitBritain and endorsed by three leading associations: the Association of Event Venues (AEV), the Meetings Industry Association (mia) and beam.

Venue membership includes a dedicated exploration session for venues that will help broaden and deepen understanding of their own sustainability goals, bi-annual venue roundtables, and bi-monthly accelerated sustainability training for the venue team.

It also provides a Progression Pathway review and action plan at nine months into the membership – to assess how far venues have come on their sustainability journey and create a future-facing, actionable plan for their next steps.

Natalie Sykes, sustainability manager, ExCeL London, said: “As a carbon-neutral venue, sustainability and our journey to Net Zero remains at the forefront of our agenda, along with our wider role in helping to drive positive change across the events industry. Through our membership with isla and leveraging their expertise, we can accelerate this together with our upcoming ESG strategy.”

Kat Ing, events manager, Science Museum, said: “We’re really excited to join isla and experience the benefits associated with our membership. The event-specific training and education provided by isla will really benefit our team, particularly as the user-friendly learning is less overwhelming and more digestible making it easier for everyone in our team to retain and implement their learnings.

“By joining isla and becoming part of the community, we hope to be able to create a blueprint of sustainable events at the museum, which we can use moving forward and promote to new and existing clients. We’re also keen to pass our knowledge and learnings onto our clients to help educate them when it comes to making more sustainable choices for their events.”

Toni Griggs, Growth Lead, isla, added: “Venues have the opportunity to lead in the industry transition to net zero; what is and isn’t possible within a space, shapes our events. I’m looking forward to pooling the knowledge of the UK’s leading venues to help drive critical change needed for decarbonisation.”