Imagine you are in a city and you hear those typical city noises: car horns, traffic and people talking. Now imagine that you are standing on a mountain and all you can see around you are houses and roads, everywhere you look. And imagine that all these sounds are blended in one general sound (or noise) mixed with the sound of salsa music and the smell of mexican food. Welcome to Mexico City!

This city is so overwhelmingly different than all the places we have been to, it is hard to describe. We have been in Mexico City (or Distrito Federal as the Mexicans call it) for five days and a lot has happened. We settled into a beautiful house from a friend we met in Holland, Oscar. Since we first met Oscar the energy level of our meetings has been very high and we had many mutual ideas about entrepreneurship, innovation and sustainability. Oscar runs a Mexican / Dutch organization that is focussed on sustainability called Los SustentableS. So, somewhere in November in Utrecht we agreed that we would come to DF and visit him to actually realize some of these brilliant ideas we had for SustentableS. Last monday we had our first meeting with the SustentableS team and we created a plan for the coming months (that’s right, we will be here for a couple of months).

And I am proud to tell you that after only five days in DF we are already making a lot of progress. We are building an Innovation Center for Sustainability in a beautiful building. The goal is to create a place where innovation, sustainability and unlimited knowledge transfer go hand-in-hand. The coming days we will be will be working hard to clean this building and prepare it for a ‘Co-Creation / BQQ / Opening -party’ that we will organise next week.At this party we are going to co-create the purposes and designs for the different rooms of the building with people from the Sustentables Network during a Co-Creation workshop. This means all the people that care about the SustentableS network, designers, creatives and others will decide together what the best way is to use this huge space that we have available. I will co-facilitate this session (in Spanish!) together with Oscar and our goal is to raise a form of social capital to fund the stuff we need to create the different rooms. This means people can decide to donate money to the room of their desire (with their signature on the wall). In doing so they will support the realization of the Innovation Center for Sustainability and in return they get to attend several workshops for free (like Entrepreneurship or Business Modeling) that will be held once the center is finished. Pretty cool right?

Ok, it is time for us to get back to business, after all, we need to make some money to pay for all our travels. Thank you for reading and let us know what you think! If you want to see some more pictures of our last weeks in Mexico (and believe me they are worth it) click here.