LeafTurtle is two
Two years of hard work, good moments, ideas pushed all the way through, projects big and small, foundational long-standing relationships and many new encounters. Above all, two years of incredible collaborations and genuinely interesting work. If you've crossed paths with us in some way over these two years, as a client, a partner, a fellow expert, this is for you too. Thank you.
Swiss army knife energy...
Looking back, we noticed something: as international as our backgrounds, our personalities and our client portfolio are, we are a real Swiss army knife. During the last two years, we've pulled out many of our different tools in many different contexts:
On the ground, in water-stressed basins, where the priority is about understanding what is at stake, before getting different stakeholders to collaborate around a shared resource and making sure regulations exist in practice, not only on paper.
In the value chains of international companies, where our job is turning a water risk flagged in a report into a concrete action plan, with the right people around the table.
At home, in Switzerland, where we're proud, active members of our advocacy community.
On stages, aiming to turn water into a subject the rooms remember long after any report's fine print is forgotten.
...following one thread
Different projects, same thread: water stewardship in action. And people. Our experience has shown: stakeholder engagement and change leadership is the only way for progress to happen. And it is what matters to us.
The last 730 days have been full of foundational moments and milestone projects:
September 2024: It's happening! After a few months of preparatory work, we take the leap and commit to our first client.
January 2025: Our LinkedIn page and the website are live, LeafTurtle is officially introduced to the world: what we've built quietly for months finally gets out in the open.
May 2025: Together with Nature's Pride, and our partners at AdAstra Sustainability, we get inside what water and biodiversity risks and impacts look like across a fresh produce supply chain, and in specific places, and get one more confirmation that supply chain resilience and water are inseparable.
June 2025: Standing at our first AWS Global Water Stewardship Forum together, in Edinburgh, the day we officially went from being two women with passions and ideas and started feeling like an organisation.
October 2025: Watching Tatiana turn twenty years of water stewardship and stakeholder engagement work into ten minutes on a TEDx stage, giving water a voice and asking what it would take to give it an actual seat at the boardroom table.
July 2026: Together with our expert network, including the Alliance for Water Stewardship, we complete our first GIZ project in Tanzania: closing a series of stakeholder engagement activities, handing over water management tools to local government, and seeing coordination between public and private actors slowly take hold.
September 2026: We reached the two years milestone. Our community keeps growing, and it shows every time we can pull in exactly the right expertise for a project and bring together impactful teams. This is something we're genuinely proud of.
This is also a good moment to thank the extraordinary network of people we get to work with: the experts, partners and collaborators who join us project by project, and who let us go places two people alone never could.
This isn't a positioning we chose on a whiteboard. It reflects LeafTurtle's values, expertise, love for connection and what we want to bring to this world.
It is not exactly always plain sailing…
And, of course, there's the behind-the-scenes:
The endless hours spent writing and rewriting a TEDx talk…
The litres of water (in the midst of heatwaves), tea and coffee (at all times) it takes to get ideas flowing…
The time and hands on deck that lack to bring them all to fruition…
The journeys to meet our community at events and on projects…
The constant adjustments and adaptations to changing circumstances that are the lived reality of a young start-up…
…but we're learning to ride the waves
We hope year three brings more of the same restless energy: even bigger ideas that get implemented, hopefully still enough coffee to go around and more healthy waters everywhere.
