American business is keen to profit from making sustainability happen – that was the clear message we took home from our recent business network event in New York.

The business people I spoke to liked our central messages: “you can win with sustainability, in fact you can’t afford to ignore it.” And I could tell they were eager to turn that into reality.

The US remains the largest economy with astonishing power – hard and soft – throughout the world. So, enabling US companies to win with sustainability is a fantastic way to achieve our charitable mission.

And sustainability is breaking through in the US. In the last few months there have been special issues on sustainability of both the Harvard Business Review and the MIT Sloan Review, which included an in-depth study with two fascinating results. Firstly, most US business people interviewed think sustainability is here to stay. Secondly, the more experience someone has in sustainable business the more important they think it is to the future of their company.

So, on Thursday 5th November, I found myself enjoying the best view in the history of Forum events. Thanks to ClimateCare we were on the fiftieth floor of JP Morgan’s offices on Park Avenue, New York. The morning sun picked out the details in the Chrysler building in one direction, and the Empire State in another.

Forum is used to working internationally from our UK base. Over the last few years our partners have asked us to give strategic advice and challenge around the world: in Kenya with Finlays and Vodafone; in the US as a member of HP’s Stakeholder Advisory Council; or across Europe with the European Commission or Coca-Cola Enterprises. Sometimes the issues involved have a global scope – recent separate projects with Pepsi and Unilever have both taken place in China, India, US and Latin America. So the New York event felt like a natural next step.

The most consistent demand from our partners is to help them in the US. The business event was an opportunity to ask ourselves two questions. Could Forum for the Future’s approach work in the US? Would it be a good way of fulfilling our charitable purpose – promoting sustainable development? The answers are broadly yes and yes.

Time and again business people were eager for our perspective from the last 13 years. They wanted to accelerate their journey towards sustainable operations, and they thought they could use our experience to take a shortcut to current best practice. Fortunately we had designed the event to do just that, through a series of break-out sessions on using scenario planning, enabling disruptive innovation, the business case and turning vision into action.

A number of our partners used the event to speed up change in their organisations. They brought key people to the event, and then held their first North America sustainability working group (or equivalent), with support from us.

All of which leaves me exhilarated: by the dynamism of New York; by the enthusiasm of business people there to win with sustainability; and by the prospects of accelerating the change needed in the world. We’re getting our heads around quite what to do next, but making a difference in the US is part of Forum’s future.