#breatheLeeds

Aim

We want to help children & young people find creative solutions to air pollution. Help us turn our vision into reality! #breatheLeeds

#breatheLeeds

Help Children and Young People in Leeds Find Creative Solutions to Air Pollution

WeareIVE need your help to enable children and young people in Leeds to find creative solutions to air pollution. Children and young people in Leeds are growing up in one of the top 10 urban areas in Europe with the highest number of deaths related to transport air pollution. (This is outlined in a report by the International Council on Clean Transportation that looked into how transport causes air pollution which then contributes to ill health pge (ii) https://www.theicct.org/sites/default/files/publications/Global_health_impacts_transport_emissions_2010-2015_20190226.pdf) We want to give our children and young people in Leeds city centre schools the chance to help shape their own futures.

Neville Street in Leeds

One particular street in Leeds city centre is the most polluted outside London. Parts of Neville Street, near the train station, have a nitrogen dioxide (NO2) level of 99ug/m3, Friends of the Earth said – more than twice the suggested limit of 40ug/m3. The council have admitted that ‘air pollution exceeds legal limits in some parts of Leeds’. (https://uk-air.defra.gov.uk/air-pollution/uk-eu-limits). 

High levels of NO2 can cause asthma or symptoms such as coughing or breathing difficulty. Ella Kissi-Debrah died in 2013 after battling severe asthma and seizures for years, living just 25m from London's South Circular Road – another notorious UK pollution hotspot. Just this month (6 years later) her mother has won a court battle for a new inquest into her death, which she blames on air pollution.

We don’t want this to happen to any child or young person. 

Through our new Applied Creativity Lab process we want to give children and young people in Leeds City Centre schools new creativity skills that help them think divergently, develop their problem-solving skills, help them to think freely and more creatively, develop their resilience, their team work and ultimately their ability to innovate.  

Connecting them up with experts over 3 days in total we will help them to apply their new creativity skills to develop innovative solutions to the very serious local (and global) problem of air pollution caused by traffic emissions. 

The ideas will be presented to experts in a ‘dragon’s den’ style pitch event for evaluation and feedback from experts, potential funders and developers who will be encouraged to take them to the next level via further crowdfunding.

 “The good news is that it is technically, and to a large extent, economically possible for Leeds to become a carbon neutral city and meet the carbon reduction targets in line with the global targets set out by the United Nations.

“However, those measures will only take us so far. We need to go further and employ a range of innovative measures to close the gap – and if we step up to the challenge and do all of those, we could close that gap and get to zero by 2050.”  Professor Gouldson, from Leeds’ School of Earth and Environment and Priestley International Centre for Climate. https://www.leeds.ac.uk/news/article/4400/new_report_plans_a_roadmap_to_a_lower_carbon_city

Without your help we won't be able to make this happen for them. We need to raise £6000 in total to make this project work.  We are working so hard to raise money ourselves and just need some help along the way. We have had some really kind donations from others and hope that this Crowdfunding Project will help raise the £6000 which will ensure that our young people can get the opportunity to invent new potential solutions to the dire air pollution issue Leeds has right now.

Thank you in advance for supporting our project. It's going to make a massive difference to the children and young people and their teachers who are really deserving of this opportunity and also ultimately to the environment and everyone’s health and wellbeing in Leeds potentially too!

WeareIVE is a 'not for profit' training company limited by guarantee with a 20 year track record of developing creative leadership skills that lead to sustained innovation. Our private, public and third sector clients include the power, chemical, manufacturing, tech, cultural and service industries. Profit generated from these training and consultancy services helps positively impact on and fund our charitable programmes that support diverse and talented young people to enter employment and develop their creative leadership potential. We believe that creative innovation lies at the heart of environmental, economic and human resilience at a time of great uncertainty. Our mission is to Build a Creative Nation That Embraces Change.

Thank you!

Thanks to Leeds City College TV & Production student Ben Halfpenny-Adams for the film and 'breatheLeeds images on this campaign and to Rabbit Hole for their help with the logo and editing advice and support! https://rabbithole.agency/studio

This project successfully funded on 10th June 2019