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
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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
The Resilient Pitch: Hackney
Lead Organization Name
Life's a Pitch Projects
My initiative is designed for and delivered in London
1
Year that you started/ registered your organisation
2024
Website URL(s) or Social Media Handles
www.lifesapitchprojects.co.uk
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
The Resilient Pitch: Hackney is a pilot exploring how young people can shape climate adaptation in grassroots football to protect participation, strengthen belonging and build more resilient communities.
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?
Climate change is disrupting grassroots football, but the deeper problem is that local football ecosystems aren’t designed to adapt alongside young people. Extreme heat, flooding, poor air quality and rising costs affect whether football spaces remain safe, affordable and available, yet responses are fragmented across schools, clubs, facility providers and community organisations. Everyone holds part of the picture, but there is rarely a shared process for turning disruption into adaptation. In Hackney, this matters because young people are growing up in a dense, unequal urban borough where affordable community spaces are increasingly under pressure. Grassroots football is not just recreation; it is a vital third space offering belonging, friendship, confidence, identity, physical activity and trusted relationships beyond home and school. When pitches close, sessions are cancelled or costs rise, young people lose more than sport. They lose access to community. The main beneficiaries are 13-18 year olds who rely on local football, school and youth provision, particularly those affected by exclusion, isolation or limited access to safe outdoor space. Through our work across football, culture, youth participation and social impact, we believe the challenge is not simply keeping pitches playable, but enabling young people to help shape more resilient football communities.
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 approach starts from a shift in understanding: climate disruption isn’t only damaging pitches, it’s exposing how fragile the relationships around grassroots football can be. When heat, flooding, poor air quality or rising costs disrupt play, the impact is felt throughout the ecosystem, but rarely through one shared response. The Resilient Pitch tests whether football can become a live adaptation lab: a place where young people help their local ecosystem notice risk, understand behaviour, test change and build shared responsibility. Our “aha” moment was realising that a cancelled session is not just lost sport. It’s lost belonging, routine, friendship, confidence, safety and community. Football is one of the few spaces where young people communicate across language, culture, class and confidence through bodies, play and shared emotion. Protecting participation is climate action, youth work and community resilience at once. The pilot follows an Audit to Adapt to Align process. Audit: young people map how climate pressures affect football spaces, participation, access, cost, confidence and belonging, combining lived experience, environmental observation, and partnership data. Adapt: young people become Climate Captains, working with local partners to test practical responses. These may include heat-aware scheduling, shade and hydration plans, pitch-use protocols, active travel, kit reuse and other locally chosen adaptations. Align: partners use the learning to build a shared adaptation process, so responsibility doesn't sit with one school, coach or volunteer. The final toolkit isn't the intervention; it's the codified method. The real intervention is young people helping a football ecosystem learn how to adapt, so participation remains resilient.
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?
Young people aren't just participants in The Resilient Pitch; they're the people best placed to help the system understand what's really happening. We'll work with 13-18 year olds through Haggerston School, Bene FC and Immediate Theatre, recruiting Climate Captains with different relationships to football, community space and climate disruption. Recruitment will include young people facing barriers, incl. inequality, exclusion, disability or limited access to safe outdoor space. A key insight from the Go! London build process is that young people experience the grassroots football ecosystem differently from any single institution. Schools see education. Clubs see football. Facility providers see pitches. Young people experience all of these together. They know how heat, flooding, cost, confidence and belonging shape whether participation is possible. The Climate Captains will form a Youth Adaptation Group. They will shape audit questions, gather peer insight, document disruption, test adaptation ideas and define success. Their role is not to validate adult assumptions, but to influence priorities, evidence and decisions throughout the pilot. Immediate Theatre will support participation and youth leadership. Bene FC will bring learning from football communities built around belonging and cultural connection. Teachers, coaches, families, facility providers, researchers and local organisations will contribute through workshops, listening sessions and feedback forums. The project isn't simply about protecting pitches. It's about protecting the relationships, routines, opportunities and belonging that grassroots football creates. By embedding youth insight into local adaptation, we are testing a replicable model of shared responsibility and climate resilience.
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 Resilient Pitch will create impact at four levels: young people, community, systems and culture. In Year 1, we will recruit a Youth Adaptation Group of Climate Captains through Haggerston School, Bene FC and Immediate Theatre. They will audit climate and participation pressures, gather peer and community insight, test practical adaptations, co-author a Youth Manifesto and produce the Resilient Pitch Toolkit. Crucially, the toolkit is not the intervention; it is the codified learning from the process. For young people, impact means increased climate literacy, leadership, confidence and agency. They will not only learn about climate change; they will help shape how their football communities respond to it. For the community, impact means stronger relationships between young people, schools, football providers, families and local organisations. We will track participation stability, cancellations, perceived barriers, adaptation readiness and the quality of collaboration between partners. At systems level, the project tests a youth-informed adaptation method. The aim is to show how grassroots football communities can notice disruption earlier, respond collectively and share responsibility rather than leaving adaptation to one coach, school or facility provider. Culturally, we want to shift climate resilience from an abstract environmental issue into something local, social and felt: protecting the relationships, routines, opportunities and belonging that grassroots football creates. Longer term, Hackney can become a demonstrator site. If the method works, the framework can be adapted by other schools, clubs and community settings, creating a credible route from local pilot to wider change.
Innovation: What is different about your initiative compared to other solutions that are already out there? How is your approach original and innovative?
This project is innovative because it reframes climate resilience as a participation, community challenge, not just environmental. Many sport sustainability initiatives focus on carbon reduction, awareness campaigns or facility improvements. Our starting point is different. We ask what happens when climate pressures disrupt the relationships, routines and sense of belonging that grassroots football provides. Rather than focusing solely on pitches, we focus on wider ecosystems. The project combines climate adaptation, youth governance, community participation and systems thinking within a single model. Young people are not consulted after decisions have been made; they help identify problems, gather evidence, shape priorities, test adaptations and influence decisions. We believe they’re uniquely positioned to do this because they experience the impacts of climate disruption directly across their sporting and community lives. Our innovation is not a product but a process. We’re testing a youth-informed adaptation method that helps communities understand, respond to and learn from climate disruption. The Toolkit captures and shares that learning. The project brings together partners that do not typically work in this way: a school, football communities, youth arts organisations, researchers and local stakeholders. This allows environmental data, lived experience and community knowledge to be treated as equally valuable forms of evidence. Instead of viewing young people as future beneficiaries of climate action, we position them as active contributors to adaptation now. The result is a replicable framework that helps communities protect not only physical infrastructure, but also the opportunities, relationships and belonging that make participation possible.
Roles and Responsibilities: Describe how responsibilities are shared among your team or partners.
The Resilient Pitch is built around a partnership model that brings together young people, education, community football, youth engagement, research and systems leadership. Life's a Pitch Projects (LAPP) will act as lead organisation and accountable body, responsible for project management, safeguarding, facilitation, partnership coordination, evaluation, reporting and production of the final Toolkit and Youth Manifesto. LAPP will also convene partners and ensure learning is captured and shared. Haggerston School will serve as the pilot site and primary education partner. The school will support participant recruitment, provide access to facilities, integrate activity within existing school structures and contribute safeguarding oversight and pastoral support. Bene FC will act as a community football partner, contributing expertise in belonging, participation and community-building through football. They will support engagement, testing of adaptation ideas and provide insight from their experience of sustaining grassroots football communities. Immediate Theatre will support youth engagement, creative facilitation and leadership development. Their experience of participatory practice, youth voice and progression pathways will help ensure young people play a meaningful role throughout the project. UCL East will act as a research and learning partner, supporting evidence gathering, participatory research design and interpretation of findings. Their involvement will strengthen the credibility and transferability of the model. The English Schools' FA will act as a knowledge-sharing and sector partner, helping connect learning from the pilot to wider conversations about schools' football and participation. Young people will form a Youth Adaptation Group and hold a formal role within project governance. As Climate Captains, they will help shape priorities, gather evidence, test adaptations and co-author project outputs. A steering group comprising all partners and youth representatives will meet regularly to oversee delivery, review learning and support shared decision-making.
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?
The project is designed as a practical pilot with long-term systems potential. Our immediate priority is testing, refining and evidencing a youth-informed adaptation process within a real grassroots football ecosystem. The project is built on existing infrastructure rather than creating parallel systems. Haggerston School provides the pilot environment, Bene FC and Immediate Theatre support participation and youth engagement, UCL East strengthens evaluation, and the English Schools’ FA supports wider knowledge-sharing. Sustainability comes from building local capability. Young people and partners leave the project with practical tools, evidence and experience they can continue using. The aim is not to create dependence on LAPP, but to embed a repeatable adaptation process that others can own. Our scaling strategy is based on adoption rather than centralised growth. If successful, the method, toolkit and governance framework can be adapted by other schools, clubs and community organisations facing similar challenges. Through our partnerships and networks, we see clear potential to test the model in additional boroughs and contribute to wider conversations around climate resilience, participation and grassroots sport. Success is demonstrating that young people can help communities adapt to climate pressures while protecting participation, belonging and opportunity.
Upcoming Milestones: Please provide an overview of the milestones that are required for your initiative to come to fruition/ to grow.
Months 1-2 – Partnership Building, Governance & Discovery: Formalise partnerships with Haggerston School, Bene FC, Immediate Theatre, UCL East and the English Schools' FA. Establish the project Steering Group and Youth Adaptation Group. Confirm safeguarding, evaluation and participation frameworks. Conduct baseline research exploring climate pressures, participation patterns, cancellations, barriers to access and community needs. Recruit and onboard Climate Captains. Months 3-4 – Youth Audit & Evidence Gathering: Climate Captains lead a participatory audit of the local football ecosystem, combining environmental observations, lived experience, participation data and community insight. Through interviews, mapping, creative activities and peer research, young people identify where climate pressures are affecting participation, belonging and community resilience. Months 5-6 – Co-Design & Adaptation Planning: Young people, partners and stakeholders work together to interpret findings and prioritise opportunities for action. This phase produces a Hackney Adaptation Framework and a practical menu of potential interventions. Success measures, responsibilities and learning goals are agreed collectively. Months 7-9 – Pilot Testing & Learning: Selected adaptations are trialled within real football environments. Learning focuses on participation stability, adaptation readiness, community relationships and youth agency. Evidence is gathered continuously to understand what works, for whom and under what conditions. Months 10-11 – Systems Sharing & Toolkit Development: Findings are translated into a youth-authored Toolkit, Manifesto and evidence report. Stakeholder sessions bring together schools, football providers, community organisations and local decision-makers to review learning and explore future adoption. Month 12 – Evaluation, Sustainability & Scaling Pathways: Evaluate outcomes against baseline measures. Produce recommendations for future delivery and identify opportunities for adoption by additional schools, clubs and community organisations. Finalise a replication framework and establish the next phase of partnership development. Long-Term Ambition: By the end of the pilot, Hackney becomes a demonstrator site for a youth-informed adaptation process that strengthens participation, builds climate resilience and provides a transferable model for grassroots sport.
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).
The capacity-building phase has been one of the most valuable parts of this process and has fundamentally reshaped The Resilient Pitch. We entered the programme with a strong idea centred on climate resilience and grassroots football. Through the workshops, systems-change tools, masterclasses, peer learning and independent research, we have challenged many of our original assumptions and significantly evolved both the initiative and our understanding of the problem itself. Several key shifts have emerged. We moved from focusing on facilities to focusing on ecosystems; from climate awareness to adaptive capacity; from youth participation to youth governance; and from producing a toolkit to testing a method. We increasingly understand that climate disruption is not simply affecting pitches, but the relationships, routines, opportunities and sense of belonging that grassroots football provides. This led us to a central insight: football functions as community infrastructure, and climate resilience is ultimately about protecting participation, not just facilities. The programme also deepened our understanding of systems change. Concepts such as leverage points, shared responsibility, participatory governance, community resilience and co-creation have become central to the project's design. We have explored how adaptation happens across interconnected systems, and how young people can move from being consulted on problems to helping shape solutions. Alongside the programme, we undertook significant additional learning through climate adaptation literature, behavioural science, youth engagement methodologies, participatory research, systems leadership and grassroots football governance. We also commissioned a multidisciplinary consultancy team spanning systems strategy, youth participation, environmental behaviour, cultural strategy, governance, visual communication and critical challenge. Their role has been to pressure-test assumptions, identify weaknesses and strengthen the initiative. Most importantly, we treated the programme as a genuine R&D process. We actively sought challenge, embraced uncertainty and allowed the initiative to evolve. As a result, The Resilient Pitch is now significantly more rigorous, collaborative and ambitious than the version originally submitted.
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?
One of the most significant shifts during the capacity-building phase has been recognising that youth participation and youth leadership are not the same thing. In our original application, young people played a central role in audits, workshops, co-design activities and toolkit development. While this was participatory, we increasingly realised that many key decisions still sat with adults. The question became: if young people are the people most affected by the issue, what would it look like for them to help shape the direction of the project itself? As a result, we have redesigned the initiative around youth governance rather than youth consultation. Young people will now form a formal Youth Adaptation Group, acting as Climate Captains and co-leaders of the project. They will help shape research questions, identify priorities, gather evidence, interpret findings, test adaptations and contribute to decision-making throughout delivery. Rather than being asked for feedback on adult-designed solutions, they will help determine what problems are explored and which responses are prioritised. This shift has also changed our understanding of expertise. We increasingly see lived experience as a form of expertise equal to environmental data, organisational knowledge and professional experience. Young people are often the only people moving between school, football, family and community spaces simultaneously, giving them a unique understanding of how climate pressures affect everyday participation. We are also building practical structures to support genuine ownership. Young people will have representation within project governance, contribute to steering group discussions, co-author the Youth Manifesto and Toolkit, present findings to stakeholders and help shape recommendations emerging from the pilot. We are exploring ways to provide a dedicated youth-led budget for testing ideas and adaptations, giving participants real influence over resources as well as decisions. Most importantly, this shift requires a change from us. Rather than seeing ourselves as delivering solutions for young people, we increasingly see our role as creating the conditions for young people, communities and partners to shape solutions together. The project is stronger because of that change.
What partnerships and collaborations are most critical to delivering and sustaining your initiative and how are you building/ plan to build them?
One of the most important lessons from the capacity-building process has been recognising that climate resilience cannot be delivered by a single organisation. The challenge we are addressing sits across education, community sport, youth participation, local infrastructure, environmental change and civic decision-making. As a result, our partnership model is intentionally designed around the wider system rather than individual activities. Haggerston School sits at the centre of the pilot. As both a physical site and a community anchor institution, it provides direct access to young people, safeguarding structures, facilities and everyday lived experience. It is where climate pressures, participation and education intersect. Bene FC brings a different perspective. As a community-led football collective, they provide insight into belonging, participation, community-building and the realities of sustaining grassroots football environments. Their experience helps ensure the project remains grounded in culture and lived experience, not just policy or infrastructure. Immediate Theatre contributes expertise in youth leadership, participation and co-creation. Their long history of supporting young people to influence decision-making strengthens our commitment to youth governance rather than consultation. UCL East provides research, evidence and learning capacity. Their involvement helps us combine environmental data, participation data and lived experience, ensuring that findings are credible, transferable and useful beyond the pilot itself. The English Schools’ FA provides a bridge into the wider schools’ football ecosystem. Their role is less about delivery and more about helping us connect local learning to wider conversations around participation, resilience and school sport. Alongside these core partners, we intend to engage local authority stakeholders and facility providers as part of the adaptation process itself. Rather than viewing them as external audiences, we want them involved in understanding barriers, interpreting evidence and exploring solutions. What unites all of these partnerships is a shared goal: protecting participation in the face of climate disruption. Together, they create a system in which young people, schools, football communities, researchers and decision-makers can contribute different forms of knowledge, share responsibility and build adaptive capacity collectively. The project is ultimately testing whether stronger relationships across a local ecosystem can produce more resilient outcomes than any single intervention alone.
What are you measuring, how are you measuring it, and what does the data tell you so far (quantitative and qualitative)?
One of the biggest developments during the capacity-building phase has been refining what success actually looks like. Initially, we focused heavily on climate awareness and participation numbers. We now recognise that these are only part of the picture. We are measuring four interconnected areas: participation stability, youth agency, adaptive capacity and systems change. At the participation level, we will track attendance, retention, cancellations, disruption events and participation patterns across the pilot period. We want to understand how environmental pressures affect young people's ability to consistently access football and community spaces. At the youth level, we will measure climate literacy, confidence, leadership and civic agency through surveys, reflective activities, interviews and observation. We are particularly interested in whether young people feel more able to influence decisions affecting their communities. At the adaptation level, we will document climate-related challenges identified through audits and track the development, testing and uptake of adaptation measures. This will include both environmental observations and practical responses developed through the project. At the systems level, we will examine relationship strength, collaboration and shared responsibility across the ecosystem. Through interviews, stakeholder feedback and network mapping, we will explore whether schools, community organisations, football providers and young people are working together differently as a result of the initiative. Our approach combines quantitative and qualitative evidence. Quantitative data includes participation figures, attendance, retention, audit findings and adaptation activity. Qualitative data includes interviews, focus groups, reflective journals, creative outputs and lived-experience accounts from young people and partners. At present, the most important data we have is not numerical. Through our research, consultation and capacity-building process, we have identified a consistent theme: climate pressures are already affecting participation, yet responsibility for responding remains fragmented. The pilot is designed to test whether a youth-informed adaptation process can help communities move from reactive responses towards shared, anticipatory action. We will know we are on the right track if young people have greater influence, partners are collaborating more effectively, and the local football ecosystem is better able to anticipate, absorb and adapt to disruption than it was at the start of the project.
Long-term impact: what lasting systems change are you seeking to create and how will you know when it has happened?
The long-term systems change we are seeking is simple to describe but difficult to achieve: ‘A youth-informed adaptation process that strengthens participation stability and distributes responsibility for climate resilience across the grassroots football ecosystem.’ At present, climate disruption is often experienced as a series of isolated incidents: a flooded pitch, a cancelled session, an unsafe heatwave, a damaged facility. Responsibility for responding typically falls on individual schools, coaches, volunteers or facility managers. Young people are affected by these decisions but rarely influence them. We want to help shift the system from reactive to anticipatory, from fragmented to coordinated, and from youth-excluded to youth-informed. In five to ten years, success would not be defined by the continued existence of The Resilient Pitch. It would be defined by the continued existence of the behaviours, relationships and decision-making structures it helped create. We would expect to see young people routinely involved in conversations about participation, facilities and adaptation. Schools, clubs, community organisations and local stakeholders would share information, identify risks earlier and work collectively to respond to disruption. Adaptation would become part of how grassroots football operates rather than an exceptional response to crisis. The deeper change is cultural as well as operational. We want climate resilience to be understood not simply as protecting physical infrastructure, but as protecting participation, belonging and community connection. Football would increasingly be recognised as a form of community infrastructure, with resilience measured not only through the condition of pitches, but through the stability of the relationships and opportunities surrounding them. We will know we are moving towards this change when adaptation activity continues beyond the pilot, when partners begin using the process independently, when young people's perspectives are actively sought in decision-making, and when responsibility for resilience becomes shared across the ecosystem rather than concentrated in a few individuals. Ultimately, if The Resilient Pitch disappeared tomorrow but the relationships, practices, governance structures and adaptation behaviours remained, we would consider that a successful systems change outcome.
Is there anything else you'd like to share with us that you were not able to share in previous questions?
Perhaps the most important thing we would like to share is how much our understanding of the challenge has evolved throughout this process. We entered the programme believing we were developing a climate resilience project for grassroots football. We leave it understanding that we are really exploring how communities adapt to change. Climate disruption is the catalyst, but the deeper question concerns participation, belonging, agency and the resilience of the social infrastructure that sits around football. Through the capacity-building process, we have become increasingly interested in the relationships, behaviours and decision-making structures that determine whether communities are able to adapt together when facing uncertainty. This shift has fundamentally changed the initiative. The project is no longer built around delivering climate education or testing isolated interventions. Instead, it is focused on creating the conditions for young people, schools, community organisations, researchers and decision-makers to learn, adapt and respond collectively. We also recognise that this pilot is not intended to provide all the answers. Its purpose is to generate learning. One of the strongest insights from the programme has been the importance of curiosity, experimentation and iteration. We are approaching The Resilient Pitch as a live enquiry rather than a fixed solution, and we believe this makes it more likely to produce meaningful and transferable change. Finally, we want to acknowledge the value of the Go! London Challenges process itself. The workshops, masterclasses, peer learning and challenge sessions have not simply strengthened our proposal; they have reshaped it. The project now reflects a far broader coalition of ideas, expertise and lived experience than the version originally submitted. Whatever happens next, that learning will remain one of the most valuable outcomes of the programme.
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