In this blog, our Head of Operations, Jennifer Smith, outlines what we’ve implemented so far and our future plans.
2020 as a catalyst for change
2020 was a transformative year in lots of ways – some more positive than others. Our offices in both London and Ashton-under-Lyne closed and we had to quickly adapt to working from home to ensure our support to children and young people was undisrupted. Since then, we’ve continued to reduce travel between our two bases by 60% – which is approximately 250kg of CO2.
The period of change in 2020 also helped us to embed our wellbeing-focused culture further. Once things started to open up, we introduced hybrid working. We still value face-to-face time with our team but we’ve reduced our office days to two days a week – reducing the amount of commuting required.
This year, we’ve moved offices in London to a more energy-efficient space and are exploring what changes we can make to our Head Office in the North West.
We also continue to limit our downstream activities by purchasing goods from local stores, making use of already planned travel to distribute items between the two offices, buying second-hand furniture and recycling items we no longer need.
Delivering our programmes: Small changes. Big Impact.
Demand for our work has grown with more children and young people needing early intervention support. At the start of 2020 we were working in 95 schools; we’re now working in over 190 schools.
Growth too often comes with increased printing. Each of our school-based programmes comes with its own workbook that our participants work through and reflect on to see have far they’ve come.
We’ve made a simple change to the naming conventions on our student workbooks which means no unused workbook need to be destroyed at the end of each academic year. Our new workbooks continue to be used until the content is updated and this saves approximately 4,000kg of CO2 per year*.
Delivering in 100 more schools means that our largest emission each year is business travel. While we sadly can’t provide our team with electric cars just yet, we are encouraging them to ‘think green’ when considering their travel habits to work and to projects. We offer an interest-free cycle loan, an expense mileage rate for everyone who decides to cycle – and will continue to support the team to change their travel habits.
Our future plans
Although we’ve already made significant steps to reduce our carbon footprint, there’s always more we can do.
Soon, we plan to:
- Provide carbon literacy training to our team
- Carry out a staff travel survey to further understand the impact our team’s journey into work is having on the planet
- Provide vegetarian and vegan options for all catered events
- Explore how carbon literacy and carbon reduction initiatives can be embedded into our programmes with children and young people.
For more information about how we plan to reach net zero by 2050, see our Carbon Reduction Plan.
*Based on 5kg of CO2 from 1 sheet of paper and 1g of CO2 for laser printing
