My initiative is designed for and delivered in London
Yes
I am 18 years of age or above, by the application deadline.
Yes
My organisation is a registered UK entity and has a London-based address.
Yes
My organisation is a non-profit (e.g. school, university, or local authority) — not a for-profit, which can only join as a partner.
Yes
If there is a for-profit organisation as a partner in my initiative, they work on a cost-recovery basis only.
Yes
My solution is implemented at scale, or if not, I have a clear business plan, a minimum viable solution (prototype, pilot, or proof of concept), and evidence of work or impact in London within your coalition.
Yes
I am aware that, if I am submitting more than one application to a Challenge run by Ashoka and Go! London, only one of them is able to progress through the stages.
Yes
Are you an employee (and their children and grandchildren) of Ashoka or any of its respective affiliates and participating advertising and promotion agencies?
No
I have read and accepted the Challenge Terms & Conditions
1
First Name
Last Name
Pronouns
Email address
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Are you an Ashoka Fellow?
Are you applying from an organization founded by an Ashoka Fellow?
If you are applying from an organization founded by an Ashoka Fellow, please specify the name and organisation of the fellow below.
Initiative Title
Green Goals
Lead Organization Name
Groundwork London
My initiative is designed for and delivered in London
1
Year that you started/ registered your organisation
2007
Website URL(s) or Social Media Handles
https://www.groundwork.org.uk/london/
Initiative Stage
Idea (You have a solid concept and are hoping to get started in the future)
Sectors/Themes: What topic does your project most directly relate to?
Environment & Sustainability
Initiative Summary: Describe your initiative in one sentence
Our initiative will harness the power of sport to enable and support young people to tackle climate change in their communities, including by building climate literacy, community organising skills, and by introducing them to leadership roles in spaces traditionally occupied by older people/those from more privileged backgrounds.
Challenge Focus: What topic does your initiative most directly relate to?
Climate action through awareness and engagement
The Problem: What problem are you helping to solve and who will benefit the most from your solution? How close are you to the problem and/or community impacted?
Climate change will continue to be a challenge in the years to come, and young people will play a vital role in tackling it. However, engagement with climate action is usually concentrated among older, educated urban professionals, with many young people (particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds) feeling excluded. Young people face structural barriers to meaningful climate action: they're locked out of decision-making, offered tokenistic participation and struggle to find accessible pathways for sustained action amid competing pressures. Current messaging paradoxically demotivates: the overwhelming scale of climate change can trigger helplessness and climate anxiety. Doom and gloom framing can turn people off rather than inspire. Individual action feels meaningless without visible collective impact and can result in cynicism rather than agency. Sport provides the missing link. It transcends class, education, and political divides: a shared passion that creates tribal loyalty and community belonging which can be channelled toward environmental commitment. By partnering with sports clubs where young people play, we can offer a seamless route into climate action for those who are interested in doing more for their communities and the planet. Our project will give young people real power, create accessible local pathways for action, and build visible collective impact.
Your approach: How are you addressing the problem outlined above? How are you using the power of sport and physical activity to build awareness, shift behavior, and enable sustainable participation for all in response to the climate crisis? We'd love to know about the origin of your idea, and what was your "aha" moment" that led you to take action?
Our initiative places young people at the centre of solution building through genuine co-design and leadership, not tokenistic consultation. We will deliver a robust, innovative and replicable model that will result in tangible impact. This approach works through trusted voices in communities where young people already gather/live, removing barriers to participation and ensuring we meet them where they are, not where we think they should be. Young people will design and lead community action projects addressing local environmental priorities they identify, from biodiversity initiatives to waste reduction schemes. They will shape digital campaigns reflecting their creativity and communication styles, not adult assumptions about what resonates. They will receive training in carbon literacy and community organising, running climate action, and leading peer-to-peer education within their own networks. As our focus will be on engaging underrepresented groups in climate action, we will confirm our sports partner during the development phase, based on warm relationships and previous partnership working. Activities will be co-designed with young people in order to make sure we aren’t speaking for them. We will invite participants to contribute their local knowledge about environmental priorities/challenges and support them to develop projects that make a real difference. Taking a collaborative approach ensures activities are not only engaging, but also flexible in response to varying local needs/interests. Crucially, we're harnessing sport’s unique power to create collective experience. This transforms climate engagement from worthy sacrifice into joyful, identity affirming participation where leadership is celebrated and peer recognition motivates sustained involvement.
Collaboration with young people and the community: In what ways does your initiative engage young people and community members closest to the problem? What role do they play in building the solution you deliver?
Co-production is central to how GL designs/delivers its activities. We recognise that people are in the best position to know what their own needs are, and what support they need to succeed. Young people will be introduced to climate leadership roles through our project, and we will aim to do this from the outset by placing agency in their hands as to how they engage. Our role is to provide the infrastructure to channel young people’s concern into sustained action; what that action is, who gets involved and how, will be determined by the young people themselves with guidance/support from GL. We will engage young people through our own established youth programmes (e.g. The Nest Youth Forum, Young Barnet Foundation), and/or youth networks belonging to sports clubs we will partner with. GL are experts in facilitating youth led, co-designed climate action projects with real and evidenced impact, making this a highly achievable project proposal that would deliver tangible outcomes for the communities we’ll reach. In practice, young people will identify local environmental priorities and design community action projects addressing issues they care about, from community ‘greening’ initiatives, waste reduction schemes and other priorities they identify which matter to them and their communities. They will shape digital campaigns using their creativity and communication styles, ensuring messaging resonates authentically with peers. Our project will train young people in carbon literacy, campaigning, and community organising/climate action, then position them as peer educators leading change within their own networks. Young people will design their own projects/interventions, decide campaign messaging, and take visible leadership roles engaging others in their community.
Potential for/Evidence of Impact: How do you imagine your initiative will make a difference in raising climate awareness, shifting behaviors, or reducing environmental impact or harm? If you have already implemented it, what difference have you made so far? What is the impact your initiative has had¡, and/or what impact do you envision having in the future?
Green Goals creates impact across three interconnected levels – Individual Impact: Young activists gain carbon literacy, community organising skills, and other transferable/soft skills, transforming abstract climate concern into tangible agency and opportunity. By providing visible roles where their contributions matter, we address the helplessness and climate anxiety that can paralyse young people, replacing cynicism with empowerment. Collective Behaviour Change: Sport’s tribal nature allows us to shift norms at scale. Digital campaigns amplify this, creating peer-to-peer influence that spreads sustainable practices throughout fan communities. We're making climate action socially rewarding rather than isolating, embedding it within an identity young people already cherish. Measurable Environmental Impact: We're mobilising young people to act. Our expert team will guide them to co-design & deliver projects, ensuring they are ambitious yet realistic, and have tangible environmental benefits. As part of the development process we will design a co-evaluation framework, agreeing target outputs/outcomes & collect qualitative/quantitative data to evidence the impact the project has. Beyond immediate metrics, we're building replicable infrastructure for youth climate leadership through sport. By documenting what works and creating shareable resources, this model can spread to sports clubs in every community, transforming how thousands of young people engage with climate action. We envision a generation of young sports fans for whom sustainability is inseparable from club identity, where supporting your team means supporting a sustainable future. Young people who experience genuine climate leadership carry that agency into careers, communities and civic life for decades.
Innovation: What is different about your initiative compared to other solutions that are already out there? How is your approach original and innovative?
Cultural Infrastructure, Not Campaigns: Traditional climate initiatives treat engagement as a communication challenge requiring better messaging. We recognise it's a structural challenge requiring accessible ways for people to engage. Sport isn't just a communication channel, it's community infrastructure reaching across class, education, and political divides that traditional environmental spaces often cannot bridge. We're embedding climate action within existing venues rather than asking young people to join new/unfamiliar spaces. Power & Agency, Not Participation: Too many youth climate programmes offer tokenistic participation. We're building genuine leadership infrastructure. Young people won't just attend workshops, they’ll design interventions, lead peer education, and take visible roles engaging others in their community. Joyful Collective Action, Not Individual Sacrifice: Climate messaging typically emphasises personal responsibility and sacrifice, resulting in feelings of anxiety and helplessness. We will harness sport's competitive, social, tribal energies, creating friendly rivalries over environmental impact, celebration events, peer recognition, and identity-affirming participation. Reaching the Unreached: Climate action disproportionately engages educated urban professionals. Young people, deprived communities, and ethnic minorities remain significantly underrepresented. Sport reaches these demographics authentically and can be harnessed to create entry points for communities traditionally excluded from environmental spaces. Scalable Model: Sports clubs exist everywhere; our structure, training, and project co-design methodology can be replicated across organisations, creating infrastructure for youth climate leadership at unprecedented scale.
Roles and Responsibilities: Describe how responsibilities are shared among your team or partners.
Groundwork London: lead organisation • Climate action training: providing context, how to design/deliver impactful projects, co-design projects and support delivery • Carbon literacy training • Overall project management • Co-creating the project with prospective partners (identified/contacted during the development phase based on warm contacts/previous partnerships) and young people, including robust project plans with milestones, target outcomes and outputs and co-designed evaluation framework, building qualitative and quantitative data collection into project delivery, enabling us to robustly evidence the difference the project has made, its impact, core ingredients for success and developing a replicable model • Co-design climate projects and support delivery: ensuring projects are ambitions, yet realistic
Viability and Scalability: How are you setting your organization up for success, and what is your plan to ensure operational sustainability of your solution and its impact? What are your ideas for scaling your initiative to the next level?
GL is in an excellent position to ensure the operational sustainability of our solution and its impact. As a leader in inclusive, community-based climate action, we have extensive experience expanding successful environmental programmes. Certain aspects of this project, such as the climate literacy training, are based on activities we have successfully delivered before. In addition, GL has strong experience co-creating solutions with young people. We draw on the creativity and vision of a Youth Advisory Board, made up of 16- to 24-year-olds from diverse backgrounds, who advise on business planning, fundraising, and campaign development. Young people are supported to design, create and start their own campaigns, events or social action groups to improve local parks/green spaces, whether creating nature guides, rewilding unwanted space, or planting trees to combat pollution. Green Goals is an exciting new development in our portfolio of climate programmes, replicating what’s previously worked while bringing this learning into new contexts. If we are successful with this project, we would not only seek to replicate/scale this into new areas, but also disseminate any learning throughout our networks, e.g. Fit & Active Barnet Partnership, Sports Development & Sustainability Teams at partner local authorities, etc. as well as local/national partners (e.g. other Groundwork Trusts).
Upcoming Milestones: Please provide an overview of the milestones that are required for your initiative to come to fruition/ to grow.
Milestone for the development period (8 weeks): Confirm sports partner organisation, following up various leads based on sports organisations we have an established relationship with (such as Tottenham FC, Brentford FC), who are delivering work in the community and are committed to sustainability/supporting community environmental & climate action. Co-design project with partner, based on overall concept as presented: develop theory of change to create a roadmap for the project clearly showing the actions and how actions, outcomes, outputs are linked to achieve the overall vision and address the problem as outlined in our application. Young people engagement, focus groups with young people & co-design sessions to start to develop specific climate action projects young people would like to implement.
Capacity-Building Participation and Support Funding: If you were to make it as a finalist, you will be required to participate in an 8-week capacity building programme. If funding/ cost is a barrier to your participation, we may be able to offer up to 10,000 GBP of grant money available to support you. Please break down below, if it is the case, what costs you would incur and you would need covered. (Please note that there are restrictions on how the grant money may be used; please refer to the T&Cs for further details (LINK).
Despite Groundwork London having a relatively large income, funding would be a barrier to our participation in the capacity building programme. The vast majority of our funding is restricted, with each of our projects having its own discreet, ring-fenced budget that must be spent on the project it’s meant for, which can only be supplemented by additional fundraising for that specific project. As we do not have a concrete partner for this project at this stage, it is crucial that we identify one during the development phase. Below are the costs we are requesting a grant towards so that we can meaningfully take part in the 8-week capacity building programme: Project development/co-creation with sports partner: 5 days = £1,837.50 Young people engagement, focus groups and co-design sessions with young people x 2 (incl. prep & feedback) = £1,470 Theory of change session = £367.50 Attendance of 8 x 2-hour capacity building workshops (incl. prep) = £1,176 Co-creation, developing detailed project plan, programme and budget, partnership agreement: 5 days = £1,837.50 Expenses, travel = £300
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