By Naomi Chapman, senior consultant, NPC
As a charity leader, you’re probably concerned about how climate change and nature loss will affect your organisation. You might be thinking about reducing your carbon emissions as an organisation or ensuring the continuity of your services in extreme weather. If you’re lucky enough to have an endowment, maybe you are switching investments to more environmentally friendly options.
But are you thinking about how climate change and nature loss will impact the people you serve, and what this will mean for the services you need to offer?
If you’ve worked your life in one sector – say, with children and young people – the prospect of engaging with environmental issues might feel daunting. But you don’t need to be an environmental expert to take action on environmental impacts. You’re already an expert in your cause. Instead, you need to find ways to bring your organisation’s expertise (and the lived experience of your users) into conversations about how to create a healthier, fairer, and more sustainable future for everyone.
Often, charity leaders facing constant pressure feel that this question is too big, or one thing too many for them to think about. But as a CEO, you have a key role to play in giving this agenda the resource and prominence required to accelerate action. It simply will not happen without your leadership.
So what can you do?
- Listen to your peers and colleagues and try to understand how the environmental crises are affecting the people that you serve. If that understanding doesn’t exist, ask someone in your team to explore the evidence and lead conversations with service users to grow it. Give them the capacity and permission to spend time exploring what the relevant impacts of the environmental crises will be for your users.
- Reflect on this insight with your team. Build conversations about environmental impacts into your strategy processes, into team away days, or into annual planning. These are great opportunities to spend time together thinking about the big picture, in order to reach a consensus about where environmental issues are relevant for you.
- Make decisions and take action. Action can range from small changes to your services that bring an environmental lens to your work, to transformative new initiatives. Consider how you can evolve your existing work to make the most of the capacity you have. And don’t wait for the perfect solution. It is better to start with some kind of action—and learn from it and grow your confidence—than to delay. Where possible, work in partnership with charities in the environmental sector or in different parts of the social sector to build momentum towards shared goals.
- Be transparent in what you are learning on the journey and encourage others to do the same, both within your organisation and with your peers. The desire to be perfect will hold you back – and delay vital support to your communities.
As you start on this journey, remember that you are not alone. Other leaders in the sector are walking alongside you, so do talk to peers about the challenges and opportunities you find on the way. Interested in learning more about how to take action on the social impacts of the environmental crises? Check out the Everyone’s Environment Pathway, which offers step by step guidance, resources and case studies.
