Environmental Justice and Social Justice

Our Journey

We used human centred design as a process to explore the topic, capture insight, define the problem we wanted to design for and propose solutions.

From our primary research three key insights leapt out at us:

1. 65% of social sector workers responding told us their organisations had either zero or minimal engagement with the crisis.
2. A similar number told us that their organisations were somewhat or very willing to take action.
3. When asked about motivation, we were told overwhelmingly that people were either fairly or highly motivated to take action.

Clearly, despite willingness and motivation, something was getting in the way of more proactive engagement and action. Our research also led us to uncover what others were doing in the sector. Encouragingly, we learned about some great initiatives and examples of deliberate action.

Our secondary research led us to:

• ACEVO’s Climate Leadership Principles, a shared commitment to acknowledge the scale of the problem, be ambitious in the pursuit for climate justice and act to deliver progress.
• NPC’s commitment, through resourcing and convening, to spur a sea-change in how the social sector understands its role in responding to the climate crisis and how it can do so whilst continuing to meet its social mission. Their message was clear: ‘the climate crisis is a risk to all our missions.’
• The SCVO & SenScot Third Sector & Net Zero Report, which shared the findings of their own survey and ‘the wider disconnect between the social sector and the climate change agenda’ and the need to highlight that ‘the climate crisis is a social justice issue.’
• John Ellerman Foundation and their approach to funding climate solutions and their undersigning of the Funder Commitment on Climate Change.
• The Children’s Trust about how they had integrated the crisis into the charity’s strategy and were adamant that ‘our work as a sector must not have a negative impact elsewhere.’

The research was clear: our sector doesn't have an awareness problem and we don’t have a willingness problem. We have an impetus problem.

So we narrowed the scope of our problem:

How might we show our colleagues in the social sector the links between their work and the environmental crisis, and show ways they can take action?

We also outlined some key principles to guide us:

1. Show not tell
2. Show the intersection between missions and the environmental crisis
3. Avoid overwhelm and information overload
4. Framing matters: go for collective optimism
5. Perfection is not required. Starting is.
6. Push for organisational action, over individual actions

Ideate & Prototype

Armed with these insights and principles, we began developing ideas and arrived at a prototype we believe could uniquely and additionally contribute. Our prototype addresses three simple questions:

1st: Why? Why should it feature high up for your organisation?

2nd: What? Now that you see why it matters so much for your organisation, what might you do that would have a material impact?

3rd: How? Now that you’ve thought about why you should act and what you might do, how can you get started with these actions?

We have produced two prototypes ‘Environmental x Social Justice Wheels’. We have a vision for both wheels to be interactive, dynamic and co-owned. We invite you to add to the wheels. Add your evidence and build the picture of how our missions connect to the environmental crisis.  Add the resources or tips that have helped your organisation take action.

Join the discussion, share thoughts, ideas & action here.