2,000-Person Community Challenge: Week 7 & Final Recap | From the First Coffee Chat to 189 Sessions

The final week—Week 7—of the 2,000-Person Community Challenge has come to an end!

We thought everyone might be running out of steam in the final days XD

But from 10–16 August, we received another 93 task reports. Ninety tasks were approved; 39 participants took part, earned 406 points, and set up 45 Coffee Chats...

It seemed everyone was racing to finally invite the people they had long wanted to talk with, but had not yet managed to meet haha.

The final cross-team online gathering also took place this week. Three speakers shared their experiences studying sustainability in Europe, from choosing programmes through to career development in the first 0–6 years after graduation.

So in this final weekly recap, we want to take a proper look back at what happened across all seven weeks.

The final week: 45 Coffee Chats — the most in all seven weeks!

Here is this week's task record:

There were only 24 Coffee Chats in Week 6, but that jumped straight to 45 in the final week!!!!

At the beginning of the Challenge, many people asked us: “How do I start a Coffee Chat?” By the final week, people had become comfortable reaching out directly—with work questions, career decisions, or study-abroad plans in hand.

A few moments from Week 7

In the final week, Team D held its first in-person gathering.

One participant said that moving from meeting online each week to actually sitting around the same table felt especially warm, and hoped the team could continue after the Challenge. Another compared it to meeting online friends in real life: they talked one-on-one about studying in Europe and internal company strategy, then ended up discussing plenty of wonderfully random topics too.

A Team C participant met a particularly special person at the gathering—someone she had encountered in her very first job.

She shared that materials this person had compiled years ago had helped her, then completely unfamiliar with how companies operated, quickly understand carbon accounting and feel more confident about continuing in the field. Years later, they unexpectedly met again at a Sustalent Hub event.

After the European sustainability study gathering, one participant immediately arranged a follow-up conversation with a speaker to explore UK programmes, examinations, and day-to-day preparation in more detail. As she was preparing to move to the UK herself, she found the speaker's first-hand experience highly practical and appreciated the time they set aside for her questions.

Another participant who had already been considering a master's degree abroad said that the three speakers' sharing helped her, for the first time, consider programme choice, post-graduation job searching, and possible constraints together.

And on the Challenge's final day, an in-person dinner took place in Taichung too.

One participant had not expected to find a group of similarly aged friends in Taichung who also cared about sustainability work. Beyond careers, they talked about how they practise sustainability day to day, why they wanted to organise events, and what life looks like after work.

Others gained a more concrete understanding of sustainability consulting from more experienced peers, and identified their next steps: taking green-talent training, strengthening their ability to read regulations and work with digital management tools, and continuing to join sustainability events in Taichung.

These are only a small part of what happened in Week 7.

Questions continued after the cross-team gathering; an online group really did turn into a dinner, and a work handover from years ago was unexpectedly picked up again at the gathering XD.

Seven-week totals: 534 reports and 2,056 points

From 1 July to 16 August, the Challenge left us with these records:

• 235 people registered a Challenge account
• 93 people reported at least one task
• We received 534 task reports
• 517 tasks were approved
• 2,056 points were earned in total

The cumulative results across the five task types were:

With 189 sessions, Coffee Chat was the most frequently completed task in the Challenge.

Across seven weeks, that meant participants made time for 189 conversations about work, career changes, study abroad, and the sustainability issues each of them was working through.

The 122 FAQ answers explored many of the questions that people new to sustainability most often get stuck on: how to start without a sustainability background; the difference between in-house and consulting roles; how to read a sustainability report; whether professional qualifications are worthwhile; and where English is useful in real work settings.

No two answers were necessarily the same—and that gave each question a range of perspectives to consider.

Do you remember these Challenge moments?

On the evening of 2 July, the Challenge began with an Instagram Live.

Everyone first got familiar with the five task types, the point system, and how the lucky draw worked, then submitted the first batch of flash tasks. More than ten participants tuned in that night, and three people won live-stream goodies that Corrine had brought back from Korea 🤣

The Week 2 flash task was to join each team's LINE group, and we also launched the Coffee Chat booking hub.

Names that had previously been scattered across the main group were assigned to Teams A–E. Team captains started checking in and arranging times, and Coffee Chats grew from four in the first week to 36.

Some participants arranged a conversation with someone they did not know for the first time. They only meant to ask a few questions, but ended up chatting for an hour and a half. From this week onward, the Challenge was no longer happening only on the website—participants were out there making the tasks happen!!!

In Week 3, the flash task became “Bring an AI agent into your sustainability workflow.”

We partnered with a brand we already loved, Raymond 30, to share a practical AI course and help everyone think through how AI could fit into their own workflows. That week's Coffee Chats also covered careers on the client and consultant sides, corporate practice, and AI's energy demand—the conversations were getting more substantial.

In Week 4, the flash task asked everyone to give Sustalent Hub feedback.

People said they felt more comfortable speaking up after joining teams, and hoped future participation could include more cross-team and cross-region options, as well as formats friendlier to introverts.

More than 15 Team A members met online that week. Jeff from Team C invited everyone for a hike, talking about sustainability roles and career-change preparation along the way. Taichung meet-ups and more cross-team gatherings genuinely followed—and we are very grateful to the team captains who made such an effort to bring everyone together 😍

In Week 5, the first cross-team online gathering took place, driven forward very effectively by Amber.

Jeff and Michael brought Scope 3, green-power procurement, supply-chain decarbonisation, and executive communication into an evening session. Team E, meanwhile, went straight out for dinner after work on Friday. Members who had first met through Challenge tasks really did gather on a Friday evening, talked about work, and started planning their next hike.

Week 6 brought another cross-team gathering as well as a Netellus company-review and seller-verification task, inviting participants to document their real experiences with companies.

At another session, “A Cross-Disciplinary Guide to Sustainability Careers,” Irene, Robin, and Scott discussed sustainability roles from the perspectives of employers and interviewers. More than 50 participants stayed online together until 10 p.m.

And then came Week 7.

The cross-team gathering focused on studying sustainability in Europe, led by Shania, Daz, and Pei, giving everyone a more realistic picture of sustainability-related degrees abroad.

Teams C and D arranged in-person gatherings, while Daz and Kai brought another table of sustainability-minded people together in Taichung. Everyone's initiative was incredibly high!

By the end of the Challenge, people seemed more familiar with how to start a conversation with someone new—and more willing to extend the invitation themselves :)

Final record for the five teams

Congratulations to Team D, led by Amber, for taking first place in the team standings!

And thank you to every team captain and member of the operations team.

Over these seven weeks, team captains did much more than send task reminders. They arranged times, found themes, invited speakers, and brought people together for online and in-person gatherings.

For many participants, their very first step began with a single invitation from a team captain in the group chat.

Thank you to everyone who shared experience from workplaces, job searching, study abroad, and career changes; to those who found the courage to arrange their first Coffee Chat; and to every person who accepted an invitation and listened carefully to someone else's questions.

There are also things that will never show up in the tables above: messages that kept going after an event, dinners and Coffee Chats that were never reported (probably lots of them XD), a question answered casually in a group chat, and an idea from a sharing session quietly brought back into someone's work.

Our system could not record those things, but we know they are still happening.

Thank you, sincerely, for joining a Challenge that began as one of our spontaneous ideas—and for turning it into something far richer than we could have planned at the start.

See you at the awards ceremony on the evening of September 12

The online tasks are over; next, it is time to meet in person!!!

On the evening of September 12, Sustalent Hub will hold the in-person awards ceremony for the 2,000-Person Community Challenge.

We will proactively invite the participants who were especially active during the seven weeks, while reserving a number of places for anyone to register themselves.

Registration details and the full event information will be announced separately once confirmed.

That is all for this weekly recap.

See you at the awards ceremony on the evening of September 12! <3