IAC and World Gold Council Host Webinar Defining Responsibly Sourced Gold

Initiatives in Arts and Culture and the World Gold Council hosted a public webinar titled "Defining Responsibly Sourced Gold," convening specialists across industry, provenance technology, and artisanal mining to examine the term’s practical meaning. The session ran from 11:30 a.m. to 1:15 p.m. EDT on Wednesday, February 25, 2026 and was presented as a public webinar inviting broad participation.

Organizers framed the event as foundational. "This webinar, the first in a series developed by IAC in collaboration with the World Gold Council, addresses the meaning of the term 'responsibly sourced gold' across the gold industry with attention to the interrelationship between the LSM and ASGM sectors," the promotional copy states. The LinkedIn announcement that carried that language also posed the core questions the panel set out to answer: "What constitutes responsibly sourced gold? What are the related issues with regards to human rights and climate?"

The program was moderated by Lisa Koenigsberg, Founder and President of Initiatives in Arts and Culture. The panel combined industry, technology, and advocacy perspectives: Edward Bickham, Senior Advisor at the World Gold Council; Dario Biedermann, Product Owner and Business Unit Lead of xTrace, an Origin Verification Technology OVT, at aXedras; Alex Buck, Vice President, ESG at Endeavour Mining; Shari Gittleman, Interim Head of the Global Coalition for Action on ASGM; and Roger Tissot, Executive Director of the Artisanal Mining Council. Those titles signal the session’s intent to marry corporate ESG concerns with artisanal and small-scale mining realities and traceability solutions.

Dario Biedermann’s role with xTrace introduced a provenance and origin verification thread through the conversation, while Alex Buck’s position in ESG at Endeavour Mining brought a large-scale supply perspective. Shari Gittleman and Roger Tissot represented organizations explicitly focused on ASGM, anchoring the discussion in the challenges facing artisanal and small-scale operators that frequently sit at the center of debates about responsibly sourced gold.

Promotional activity for the webinar appeared on LinkedIn and Instagram, and a Retail-Jeweller listing reproduced the headline under its Conferences & Summits section. Retail-Jeweller’s post included event imagery identified by filenames such as IAC-WGC-25-Feb-webinar-300x200.webp, Sedulo-Event-RJ-Website-image-565x376px-300x200.webp, and AI-jewellery-event-300x200.webp. Ruth Faulkner published an event announcement dated February 17, 2026 that preceded the webinar.

Although the LinkedIn copy invited readers "To register:" and displayed "REGISTER HERE:", the supplied promotional materials did not include a registration URL or platform link. The Instagram snippet in the supplied material repeated the invitation and date but was truncated and likewise contained no registration link. Organizers relied on LinkedIn, Instagram, and trade outlets such as Retail-Jeweller to publicize the session.

As the first installment in an IAC and World Gold Council series, the webinar foregrounded a cross-sector dialogue that pairs origin verification technologies and ESG practice with the lived realities of ASGM actors and large-scale miners. The convening set a practical agenda for subsequent sessions to refine definitions that will shape compliance, provenance claims, and sourcing decisions across the gold jewelry supply chain.