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
I would like to receive notifications and updates about Go London!, Ashoka, Ashoka Changemakers, and other Ashoka opportunities.
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
LENS: London Evidence Network through Sport
Lead Organization Name
Common Purpose Charitable Trust
My initiative is designed for and delivered in London
1
Year that you started/ registered your organisation
1989
Website URL(s) or Social Media Handles
www.commonpurpose.org
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?
Civic Engagement
Initiative Summary: Describe your initiative in one sentence
LENS - the London Evidence Network through Sport - builds London's first youth-led climate intelligence network, using community sport as the infrastructure through which young people generate, own, and act on hyperlocal climate data. London's young people know which pitches flood, which cycling routes expose them to pollution, which tracks overheat. But that knowledge never becomes evidence, reaches decision-makers, or belongs to them. Meanwhile, councils and clubs decide blind, holding weather stations but no microclimate data at pitch level, while consultancy costs upwards of £200,000 per borough. Over 12 weeks, 30 young people (11–18) and 30 adults work in parallel, then converge. Young people gather professional-grade evidence through sport: rowing the Thames to detect warming, swapping pitches to capture heat differentials, cycling with air-quality monitors. Adults map the institutional systems the evidence must navigate. At Week 7, mixed-age teams prototype solutions live. Clubs act immediately; councils guide investment. Clubs become permanent climate action nodes, each cohort cascading to five more. Young people own their narrative throughout through audio-visual storytelling - combining film, audio, and ongoing digital reflection (such as video diaries and social content) - reframing themselves from climate-affected narratives into intelligence generators and solution architects.
Challenge Focus: What topic does your initiative most directly relate to?
Enabling climate-resilient participation
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?
The gap LENS addresses is structural, which is why current approaches fall short. Climate change hits London's youth sport unevenly, along fault lines of inequality. In Newham and Southwark, pitches flood, tracks overheat, and cycling routes expose young people to pollution that raises heart rates, slows recovery and cuts participation. In Richmond, tree cover creates different microclimates for the same sport. Girls face compounded barriers: worse facilities, hotter slots, less safety on active travel. Sport drives emissions via car travel and grid energy. Yet clubs lack data on the impacts they face or the emissions they cause. The data doesn't exist because the two groups who could produce it never connect. Young people hold embodied intelligence: flooding navigated, routes avoided, peer dynamics that decide whether behaviour change sticks. Adults hold institutional intelligence: how budgets move, who signs off procurement, which officer controls infrastructure. Approaches reach one or the other, never both. Youth consultations gather opinions but grant no access or agency. Adult-designed programmes miss lived experience. Awareness campaigns build consciousness, not capacity. Consultancy produces abstract data at £200,000+ per borough, sat in reports while nothing changes. Nothing connects embodied knowledge to institutional power. LENS makes that connection permanent.
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?
LENS began in conversations with young people. They held detailed, embodied climate knowledge - but it never left the conversation, never became evidence, never reached decision-makers. They were describing, without the words for it, a system that allocates climate risk along existing lines of power. That was the aha: the evidence already existed inside young people, with no route to those who shape infrastructure and investment. The mechanism is a structural convergence between two knowledge types existing approaches keep separate. Young people hold the primary evidence. Adults hold the institutional map. The 12-week programme brings them together at the exact point solutions become possible. Weeks 1-4, Evidence Generation: young people capture hyperlocal evidence through sport - rowing the Thames for water warming, swapping pitches (Newham/Richmond) for heat differentials via wearables, cycling with air-quality monitors, auditing energy and waste - co-designed with borough climate teams to a standard councils trust. Weeks 5-6, Parallel Systems Intelligence: youth build sport-leadership skills shadowing facilities managers and interviewing coaches on things like psychological safety, while adults map budgets, decision points and networks. Week 7, Convergence Sprint: mixed-age teams prototype solutions in live sessions - youth know what to solve, adults how. Weeks 8-12, Legacy and Cascade: a growing Challenge Library, each cohort training five further clubs. Sport builds awareness, shifts behaviour and makes participation sustainable for all. Clubs act now - rescheduling around heat, hydration protocols, walking buses, zero-waste - tackling the conditions that push girls and poorer young people out. Councils shade pitches, fix polluted routes, build cycle lanes.
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?
LENS works because the two knowledge types it combines - embodied youth intelligence and adult institutional access - are genuinely equal, and the design enforces that equality structurally. Young people hold the lead knowledge role throughout. They generate the primary climate evidence, lead solution design at the Convergence Sprint, prototype in live settings, deliver cascade training to peer clubs, and control all narrative production - film, audio and social content. Adults hold a bounded role as System Guides: providing institutional access and navigation, but explicitly not permitted to design solutions or speak on behalf of young people. The parallel tracks in Weeks 5-6 exist precisely to stop adult institutional knowledge shaping youth-led evidence before the two converge at Week 7. This is the model because it's the only one that produces evidence neither group can generate alone. Youth consultation without institutional access produces findings that go nowhere; adult programme design without embodied knowledge produces solutions that don't fit. The intergenerational convergence is the mechanism, not the message. Partners support targeted recruitment and safeguarding, ensuring we reach the young people with the most direct experience of climate inequality in sport - girls, those from low-income households, those with least access to quality facilities. Their involvement is central to evidence quality: if we don't reach the right young people, the intelligence is incomplete. Clubs, youth organisations and borough councils co-host throughout for local relevance - evidence partners, not just delivery venues. They commit to acting on participant-generated findings within the programme timeline, closing the loop between knowledge generation and systemic change.
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?
The impact of LENS operates at three connected scales, each enabling the next. 1. At club level, the evidence generates immediate action. A rowing club shifts to morning sessions after detecting temperature spikes. An athletics club introduces hydration protocols from recovery data. A football club's walking bus eliminates 24 car trips weekly. A cycling club removes 500+ single-use plastics annually. A rowing club uses LENS data to advocate for solar panels at their facility. These are not projected ambitions, they are the direct, short-term outputs of clubs acting on evidence their own participants generated. 2. At borough level, aggregated patterns from multiple clubs inform infrastructure investment. Which pitches to shade. Which routes require air quality intervention. Where protected cycle lanes would shift behaviour at scale. Data showing 40% of young people would cycle with protected infrastructure justifies approximately £50,000 of council investment, enabling 200+ young people to replace car trips, eliminating an estimated 20,000+ car trips annually across the borough. 3. At network level, the cascade model multiplies impact without multiplying cost. Each of 20 trained clubs trains five more. Within 12 months, 500+ additional participants are engaged. Behaviours normalise through repetition: within 6 months, walking buses are standard, zero-waste is the default, equipment sharing is routine. By Year 2, 100 clubs across London reach 2,000+ participants as climate intelligence hubs. Year 1 targets: 720 participant-weeks of hyperlocal climate data; 60 trained climate leaders; 4–6 tested adaptation and mitigation models; 20 permanent climate action nodes; open-source Challenge Library available to all London clubs.
Innovation: What is different about your initiative compared to other solutions that are already out there? How is your approach original and innovative?
What makes LENS genuinely new is not any individual component. Wearables exist, youth programmes exist, climate consultancy exists. What is new is the combination, and specifically what that combination makes possible. Three existing approaches each fail in a predictable way. Youth consultations capture opinion but not rigorous evidence and give young people no institutional access. Adult-designed programmes produce solutions that don't fit lived experience. Traditional consultancy produces credible data that communities had no hand in generating and cannot act on directly. LENS resolves all three failures simultaneously. It produces rigorous evidence because professional-grade methodology co-designed with council officers makes youth-generated data impossible to dismiss. It gives young people institutional access because adult System Guides open the doors that youth evidence needs to walk through. And it produces solutions that communities can act on immediately because clubs are the testing ground, not a later audience for findings. The second innovation is what happens to the evidence. Most programmes generate findings for one audience. LENS generates evidence that serves clubs and councils simultaneously, at different scales and on different timescales. Clubs act within weeks - scheduling, travel, waste. Councils use aggregated patterns over months and years - infrastructure, investment, policy. The same evidence generation process serves both without either having to wait for the other. The third innovation is permanence. The Challenge Library, cascade model and embedded club nodes are designed to continue generating evidence and driving behaviour change after funding ends. This is not a programme with an end date. It is a network with a growth model.
Roles and Responsibilities: Describe how responsibilities are shared among your team or partners.
Common Purpose leads programme design, facilitation, intergenerational systems methodology, evaluation, and partnerships. Sport partners (clubs, facilities, governing bodies) provide access to facilities, participants, and testing environments; commit to acting on participant-generated evidence. Community and youth organisations support recruitment, safeguarding, and targeted outreach to underrepresented groups. We will be working closely with Barnardo's here. Strategic partners contribute technology (wearables, data platforms)(we are in conversations with google), communications support (film/audio production for youth-led storytelling), and scaling expertise. Our partner Bak Creative Communications will support us here. Youth participants generate climate evidence for both adaptation and mitigation, lead solution design, prototype interventions, deliver cascade training, control narrative production through film and social content. Adult participants map institutional systems, provide access to decision-makers, offer navigational support, mentor without displacing youth leadership. Borough councils co-host activities, provide access to officials and processes, commit to considering participant-generated evidence in infrastructure planning and climate investment decisions.
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?
LENS is designed to make itself less necessary - which is how it becomes permanent. We are set up to deliver: an experienced team, safeguarding-led recruitment, and monitoring and evaluation embedded from Week 1 - impact evidenced, not assumed. The modular Challenge Library lets clubs adopt interventions independently. Youth-led documentary shorts show solutions in practice, spreading by inspiration, not instruction. Each cohort's cascade training embeds the methodology in five clubs - a self-perpetuating network not reliant on Common Purpose's delivery. For £100,000, LENS delivers hyperlocal evidence across four boroughs: 60 trained leaders, 20 permanent nodes, a replicable methodology, a cascade network reaching 500+ participants - clubs generating intelligence independently after funding. Revenue diversification is built in from Year 1: adaptation data for governing bodies; infrastructure evidence for councils; a youth-led mitigation model for climate funders; impact metrics for sponsors. Challenge Library and cascade training create earned income as the network scales. Common Purpose's 35-year track record and relationships with borough climate teams, sports bodies, governing bodies and civic networks make Year 1 viable and Year 2 city-wide scaling realistic. Year 3 replication in other UK cities runs through its national network - no relationships built from scratch.
Upcoming Milestones: Please provide an overview of the milestones that are required for your initiative to come to fruition/ to grow.
Months 1-2: Partner confirmation (sport clubs, borough councils, youth organisations) and recruitment (60 participants: 30 youth, 30 adults) Months 3-4: Phase 1 delivery. Evidence generation through sport for both adaptation (rowing Thames measuring water warming, postcode pitch swaps capturing heat differences) and mitigation (mapping current travel patterns, auditing club waste and energy use) Month 5: Phase 2 delivery. Leadership principles and systems intelligence (parallel youth-adult tracks); Design Sprint (mixed-age teams prototype solutions through live sport); External validation (peer clubs test interventions) Months 6-9: Phase 3 delivery. Cascade rollout (each team trains 5 clubs in both adaptation and mitigation approaches) and Challenge Library launch (open-source resource live and accessible) Months 10-12: Evaluation and impact documentation (film/audio capture of youth narratives showing transformation from climate victims to intelligence generators, evidence of council use, measurable emissions reductions from mitigation behaviours), and scale planning (partnership development for Years 2-3)
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).
To participate fully in the capacity building programme and use the 8 weeks to develop LENS to launch-readiness, we would incur the following costs: External expertise and consultancy (~£4,000) Climate data methodology consultancy - working with an external specialist to co-design the evidence generation framework so it produces data compatible with council planning requirements. Wearable technology consultancy - expert guidance on selecting and configuring professional-grade sensors (air quality, heart rate, GPS) for youth use in sport settings. These are critical to ensuring LENS produces credible, actionable evidence from day one. Technology and prototyping (~£3,000) Prototyping the Challenge Library platform - developing the open-source digital infrastructure that enables cascade replication across clubs. Procurement of sample wearable sensors for methodology testing during the programme period, allowing us to pilot and refine the evidence generation approach before launch. Creative development with Bak Creative Communication (~£2,000) Developing the storytelling framework and piloting documentary short formats - working with our creative partner to design the youth-led narrative approach (film structure, audio diary methodology) so it's ready to deploy at programme launch. This is the infrastructure that drives peer adoption and cascade. Local travel and project development costs (~£1,000) Travel across boroughs for partnership meetings with club leads, borough climate teams, and facilities managers during the development period. Materials for methodology workshops and pilot testing. All costs are directly linked to project development during the programme period - building the methodology, technology, partnerships, and creative infrastructure needed to launch LENS. No costs relate to salaries, events, or ongoing delivery.
Now that you've explored what it truly means to put young people at the centre, how are you designing your initiative so that young people are genuine co-leaders and co-creators of the initiative?
LENS is built on a foundational premise: young people are not participants in this programme, they are its primary knowledge holders. Every structural element of the design reflects that. The most important design feature is the asymmetry of roles. Young people hold the lead knowledge function throughout, generating the primary climate evidence through sport, leading solution design in the Convergence Sprint, prototyping interventions in live settings, delivering cascade training to peer clubs, and controlling all narrative production through film, audio and social content. Adults hold a defined and deliberately bounded role as System Guides: they provide institutional access, explain processes, and open doors to decision-makers but they are explicitly not permitted to design solutions or speak on behalf of young people. This isn't a rhetorical distinction; it is enforced through the programme architecture. The parallel tracks in Weeks 5–6 exist precisely to prevent adult institutional knowledge from colonising youth-led evidence generation before the two converge. The Convergence Sprint at Week 7 is where co-leadership becomes most visible. Mixed-age teams bring together youth climate intelligence and adult systems knowledge to prototype solutions in 180-minute live sport sessions. Neither group can generate the solution alone. Youth identify what needs solving, they hold the problem authority. Adults know how to make it happen within institutional systems, they hold navigational authority. The design requires both, and positions young people's evidence as the starting point. Narrative ownership is the third structural commitment. Young people produce all communications about their own experience - the films, audio and social content are theirs to shape, distribute and own. Common Purpose does not produce content about young people's climate experience; young people produce content about it. The material serves both as a source of insight and evidence for the Challenge Library and as a public-facing tool for engagement, influence and movement-building. This repositions them from subjects of a programme to authors of a movement. Finally, the Challenge Library is perhaps the clearest long-term expression of co-leadership. It is built entirely by participants, grows with each cohort, and belongs to the network, not to Common Purpose. Young people from the first cohort become mentors for the second. The design is intended to make our direct facilitation progressively less necessary, not more. Reflecting on Hart's Ladder of Participation, LENS is designed to operate at Level 6 - adult-initiated shared decisions with young people - from the outset, with the cascade model creating the conditions for Level 7 (child-initiated and directed) activity as the network matures.
What partnerships and collaborations are most critical to delivering and sustaining your initiative and how are you building/ plan to build them?
LENS requires five categories of partner, each occupying a distinct role in the system we are trying to shift. We have mapped these using the 5 Levels of Stakeholder Engagement framework, distinguishing between the partners we need to co-create with, those we need to collaborate with, and those we need to involve or influence. Sport clubs and facilities (co-create) are the primary delivery environment and the primary evidence partners. They provide access to participants, facilities and testing conditions and they commit to acting on participant-generated findings within the programme period. This commitment is non-negotiable: without clubs willing to be changed by what young people discover, the evidence loop doesn't close and LENS becomes another consultation exercise. We are building these relationships directly in Newham, Southwark, Tower Hamlets and Richmond, with a particular focus on clubs that already have some climate consciousness and are looking for the evidence base to act on it. Borough councils (co-create) provide institutional legitimacy and are the ultimate audience for aggregated evidence above club level. We are co-designing the data methodology with borough climate officers so that participant-generated evidence meets the standard required to justify infrastructure investment decisions. This co-design relationship is what distinguishes LENS data from youth consultation findings, it has been shaped by the people who will use it. Councils also provide access to officials and procurement processes that young people engage with directly as part of their systems intelligence learning. Barnardo's (collaborate) leads our safeguarding framework and targeted outreach. Their role ensures that the young people we recruit are those with the most embodied experience of climate inequality in sport - girls, young people from low-income households, those with the least access to quality facilities. This is central to the evidence quality, not peripheral to it. If we don't reach the right young people, the intelligence we generate is incomplete. Technology and data partners (collaborate) - we are in active conversations with Google regarding wearables and data platforms. Professional-grade equipment is what gives our evidence credibility with councils and governing bodies. It is also what distinguishes LENS from a citizen science project - the data is rigorous enough to carry institutional weight. Communications partner BAK Creative (involve) supports the youth-led storytelling infrastructure through film-making, audio production and social media storytelling workshops, alongside ongoing coaching, technical advice and creative mentoring throughout the programme. The partnership builds participants' confidence, skills and public profiles while ensuring creative authority remains firmly with young people. BAK brings production expertise and platform knowledge, enabling participants to shape, produce and share their own stories on their own terms. Underpinning all of this is Common Purpose's 35-year network across London's civic, public sector and sport organisations. The relationships that make partner confirmation possible, with borough climate teams, sports bodies, governing bodies, and corporate funders, are not being built from scratch. They are being activated for a specific purpose.
What are you measuring, how are you measuring it, and what does the data tell you so far (quantitative and qualitative)?
LENS measures across four levels of impact, reflecting the distinction the capacity building programme drew between measuring to prove the thesis and measuring to improve the methodology. Both matter, and our framework is designed to serve both purposes. Level 1 - Participation and reach. Number of young people and adults completing the full 12-week programme; demographic breakdown against target populations; session attendance consistency across all 12 weeks. Attendance consistency is a proxy for genuine engagement quality, not just who signed up, but who stayed. Target: 60 participants across 4 boroughs, with demographic profiles reflecting the communities most affected by climate inequality in sport. Level 2 - Evidence quality and club action. Volume of hyperlocal climate data generated across the four evidence generation challenges; borough climate officer assessment of whether the data meets the standard required for infrastructure planning; number of clubs acting on participant-generated findings within the programme period. This is the critical early proof point, if clubs don't act, the intelligence loop hasn't closed. Target: all 20 partner clubs implementing at least one evidence-based adaptation or mitigation practice by Week 12. Level 3 - Cascade and behaviour change. Number of clubs trained by participant cohorts through cascade delivery; adoption rates of specific practices - walking buses, zero-waste protocols, equipment sharing - across cascaded clubs at 3 and 6 months post-programme. This is where individual programme impact becomes network effect. Target: 20 trained nodes cascading to 5 clubs each, reaching 500+ additional participants within 12 months. Projected behaviour change: hundreds of car trips eliminated weekly; thousands of single-use plastics removed annually from club operations. Level 4 - Systems and narrative change. Whether council climate plans reference LENS data in formal planning documentation within 12 months; whether youth participants self-report as intelligence generators rather than programme recipients at Week 12; whether adults report that young people's evidence changed their own thinking or practice. These are the indicators of the deeper shift LENS is working toward, not just what participants did, but whether the system itself is starting to change. How we collect it: wearable and air quality data captured continuously through Weeks 1–4; participant journals and structured reflection at convergence points; pre/post surveys for both cohorts using adapted systems literacy measures; club-level adoption tracking at 3 and 6 months; qualitative interviews with 8–10 participants at programme end; borough climate officer assessments of evidence quality. Common Purpose's track record across 35 years of leadership programming gives us a strong baseline for the participant-level indicators: consistently 85%+ of participants report changed practice within 6 months. Evidence from comparable youth-led climate programmes in other cities, where youth-generated hyperlocal data has successfully influenced infrastructure decisions when produced to professional standards, gives us confidence in the council-level indicators. LENS is the first programme to combine both within a community sport infrastructure, and we expect the results to exceed what either strand has achieved independently.
Long-term impact: what lasting systems change are you seeking to create and how will you know when it has happened?
Our targeted systems change goal is this: community sport in London becomes permanent climate intelligence infrastructure - generating hyperlocal evidence, driving behaviour change, and reducing emissions as a core part of how sport operates, not as a funded add-on. To reach that goal, three things in the current system need to shift, using the 5R framework as our lens. The roles need to change. Currently: clubs are recreational service providers; young people are participation targets; councils are data commissioners who outsource intelligence gathering; and climate action is something that happens to sport rather than through it. LENS repositions clubs as evidence generators, young people as primary knowledge holders with institutional access, and councils as partners in a community intelligence network rather than commissioners of consultancy. The rules and mindsets need to change. The informal rule that youth voices are consultable but not authoritative — that lived experience is interesting but not rigorous, is the deepest barrier LENS is addressing. Professional-grade wearables, co-designed methodology, and council officer validation are not just data quality measures. They are a deliberate strategy to make youth-generated intelligence impossible to dismiss. When a 15-year-old in Newham presents temperature differential data from a pitch swap that a facilities manager can verify, the rules about who counts as a credible knowledge producer start to shift. The relationships need to change. The connection between embodied community knowledge and institutional investment decisions currently doesn't exist in London's sport and climate systems. LENS builds it structurally, not through one-off events or consultations, but through ongoing nodes that generate evidence continuously and feed it into the decision-making processes adults have been mapped to navigate. We will know the change is happening through a progression of signals. In Year 1–2: clubs independently applying Challenge Library interventions without programme support; council climate plans citing community sport data; young people from the first cohort mentoring the second. In Years 2–4: sport governing bodies integrating LENS methodology into coach training; borough climate investment decisions routinely drawing on community evidence. In Years 5–10: the narrative about young people in sport has shifted from participation problem to climate knowledge resource, and that shift is visible in how councils commission evidence, how governing bodies design coach education, and how clubs understand their own purpose. If LENS disappeared tomorrow after Year 1, what would remain is a trained cohort of 60 climate leaders, 20 clubs with embedded evidence-generation practice, an open-source Challenge Library available to every club in London, and critically, a body of youth-generated hyperlocal data that has materially influenced at least one council infrastructure decision. That residue is the proof of concept for the permanent infrastructure we are building. The frame change we are ultimately working toward is a shift in who is seen as a legitimate producer of climate knowledge. That shift, from consultant to community, from adult expert to young intelligence generator, is both the hardest thing to measure and the most important thing to get right. It is what makes everything else sustainable.
Is there anything else you'd like to share with us that you were not able to share in previous questions?
Two things worth naming directly. The first is the specific gap LENS fills that nothing else currently does. Councils in London commission consultancy for borough-level climate data. Charities run youth engagement programmes. Sport organisations focus on participation growth. No one is building the connective infrastructure between all three - the network that routes community knowledge into institutional decision-making and routes institutional access back to community actors. That gap is structural, not accidental, and it is why the evidence councils need to make good climate investment decisions keeps not existing. LENS is designed to close that gap permanently, not temporarily. The second is the value proposition relative to cost. Traditional consultancy produces abstract borough-level data per study - data that clubs cannot act on and that young people had no hand in generating. For £100,000, LENS delivers hyperlocal evidence across four boroughs, 60 trained climate leaders, 20 permanent evidence-generating nodes, a replicable and open-source methodology, and a cascade network reaching 500+ additional participants within 12 months, with clubs continuing to generate intelligence beyond the funding period entirely independently. The infrastructure cost is a one-time investment. The returns compound.
