Inspiring children on climate action

Aim

To support schools in their teaching about climate change and inspire their students to begin taking action on the issue.

We had a fantastic academic year last year, culminating in our busiest ever term in the summer. Here are some quotes from students who took the programme last term:

• 'These workshop convinced me to look after our Earth.'
• 'Very inspirational and makes you feel like you can help change the world.'
• ‘It was the best thing ever.'

Now we're making plans to expand our services to more schools in new areas of London. We have a simple and engaging approach which inspires children into climate action. And we’d love your support to carry on the work. 

So, what exactly do we do?

We teach children about climate science to inspire them and their families to take action. We do this by sending trained volunteers into schools to deliver workshops about carbon literacy and the future beyond fossil fuels.

What’s the vision?

We aim to give children the knowledge and the motivation to get involved with the issue and discover that climate action can be fun. Through this we also aim to make children less anxious about the issue, by giving them a message of hope and positivity.

Some of our brilliant volunteers in action

We’ve already achieved so much!

So far, our volunteers have educated over 7000 children about climate change. On top of this over 2500 students have been through our in-depth carbon literacy programme.

We started off small but we are now steadily expanding our services across London. We’ve got lots of volunteers and schools who want to welcome them, we just need your continued support to make it all happen. A lot of our volunteers are leaders in their fields - scientists, journalists, sustainability experts. We're currently working with primary schools in Merton, Wandsworth, Lambeth, Southwark and Westminster, and in the autumn we will be expanding into Islington and Lewisham. 

We're responding to the immediate need for more teaching about climate in schools. 75% of teachers recently said they hadn’t received adequate training to teach about climate change (YouGov Survey 2019). Our volunteers have energy, expertise and a great set of activities to engage children. Through video animation, drama role plays and art-based activities, we get them thinking about climate change in a fun, positive way, and taking small bite-size actions that feel manageable and worthwhile.

Our goals

We’re raising money towards the costs of our autumn term. During this last summer term we sent out over 20 volunteers and 665 students participated in our programme. We are increasing our numbers each term and our aim for the autumn is 30 volunteers reaching 1000 students.

Every student we teach will also reach back to their families. So 1000 students = c.4000 people.  If each of these families is inspired to drop just one tonne from their annual carbon footprint, that really makes a difference. And our research shows our programme has an impact: 94% of students said it helped them to understand the carbon impact of their travel and food, while 54% said it had inspired them to use their car less and 32% said their family were now eating less meat.

A breakdown of the costs and benefits

It currently costs us approximately £10,000 a term to run our programme – that’s to recruit and support the volunteers, match them up with schools, and monitor the effectiveness of our work. We keep our costs down because we place volunteers in schools close to where they live/work, and we also have volunteers helping out with many other parts of the charity.

To get technical: if in the autumn term we reach 1000 students and each of their families is able to drop one tonne from their annual carbon footprint, that’s a saving of 1000 tonnes of CO2 at a cost of £10,000, working out at around £10 per tonne of CO2. Direct air capture of CO2 currently costs anything from £70-£400 per tonne. By teaching people about carbon literacy and saving the CO2 going into the atmosphere in the first place, we could save CO2 between 7 and 40 times more efficiently than removal/sequestration methods!

Can you support us to reach more children?

Some of our amazing volunteers!

You can find out more about our work here.

Here are some testimonials from schools:

• ‘Climate Ed were nothing but fantastic.’ (Ravenstone Primary, London)
• ‘The presentation was perfect and got the children talking. Brilliant.’ (Wimbledon Chase Primary, London)
• ‘I would recommend that all children have the opportunity to take part in this carefully constructed and relevant programme.’ (Furzedown Primary School, London)

And from the children:

• ‘I enjoyed it because it inspired me to do more things to help climate change. It was all amazing.’
• ‘Now I want to help the world by spreading the word.’
• ‘Before I knew about climate change but had no idea how to prevent it. But now I feel passionate about the topic and I know how I can help.'
• ‘I would give it 1,000,000,000 out of five if I could!’

This project successfully funded on 20th September 2022