The Everyone’s Environment Pathway
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If you’re part of a charity, you’re probably concerned about the impact of climate change and nature loss on the people you serve.
The Everyone’s Environment Pathway is a guide to how you can help. For how your charity can respond. And for how to encourage your organisation to take practical action to support the people you serve.
The pathway contains tools, resources, and case studies to inspire your next steps. Whether those are your first steps, or you’ve already started your journey.
The Everyone’s Environment Pathway is part of NPC’s Everyone’s Environment programme.
Who is the Pathway for?
You don’t need to be an environmental expert. You’re already an expert in your cause. What’s important is bringing that expertise—and the lived experience of the people you support—into conversations about how to create a healthier, fairer, and more sustainable future for everyone.
The Pathway isn’t a guide to getting your organisation to net zero. (If you’re interested in this, find out more here.) The Pathway is about how to change the work you already do, the ways you already work, and the campaigns you already run in the context of environmental crises.
We hope the Pathway will be helpful for three groups of people in a charity: Champions, Senior Leaders, and Trustees.
Almost every charity acting on the environmental crisis began with a champion. Someone with passion to do more. Who was willing to push others to do more. If you’re reading this, this could be you!
Champions have many different day-jobs, and develop a remit for environmental action on top of their current job. Over time, this sometimes becomes an official responsibility. Or, in larger organisations, a dedicated post.
As organisational leaders, you have a key role to play in giving this agenda the resource and prominence required to accelerate action. Without your leadership, action will not happen. Or, at best, will be very difficult.
As well as a moral obligation to act, board members have legal obligations to act in their charity’s best interests. This includes looking outwards, thinking long-term, and managing risks. Today, this requires action on how the environmental crises affect your charity’s purpose.
Throughout the Pathway, we’ll share specific actions that people in each one of these three groups can take.
While the Pathway is written from the perspective of a social charity thinking about environmental issues, we hope it will also be useful for environmental charities thinking about social issues.
Navigating the Pathway
This Pathway has four steps: Explore, Reflect, Act, and Learn.
Each step contains:
- key actions
- key questions
- common concerns and how to address them
- case studies
- links to further resources
All these steps are equally important and closely connected. You can jump in wherever feels right for your organisation, or follow every step in order. You will probably repeat steps as your understanding and confidence grows, or as you tackle different topics. The Pathway will always help you with your next step, not take you to a fixed destination.
If you’re not sure about any of the terminology we use, you can take a look at the glossary.
- Grow your understanding of the impacts of the environmental crises on the people you serve. And on your programmes, advocacy, and/or mission.
- Explore ways your organisation could add to the existing evidence base on how people are impacted by environmental change. Think about what insight you could share from your current work, or by raising up the voices of your users.
- Ask around in the team to see who else is interested, and form a group if you can.
- Ask peers in other organisations what they are thinking about and whether they would be interested in sharing information and learning.
- Try to get the topic on the agenda. For example, try asking for five minutes to speak at a staff meeting, senior management team meeting, or board meeting.
- Communicate clearly the importance of everyone exploring together what the environmental crises mean for your organisation and the people you serve.
- Listen to your peers, colleagues, and users to understand how the environmental crises are affecting your organisation.
- Assign a champion within your team with responsibility for exploring the evidence and leading conversations internally. Give them the capacity and permission to spend time on this. Keep proactively involved in what they are doing so you can help resolve internal road-blocks.
- Advocate for a similar champion to be assigned on your board of trustees.
- Make time to explore the evidence. Board involvement early on is crucial to ensure sufficient momentum to drive action.
- Make space on your agenda at a board meeting or away day for discussion of the impacts of the environmental crises on your mission and users.
- Remember that charity law requires trustees to ‘make balanced and adequately informed decisions, thinking about the long-term as well as the short-term’, including in relation to the environment.
Key questions
- How are the people you serve impacted by climate change and nature loss?
- How, and how fairly, are the people you serve impacted by environmental policy?
- How will the intersection of multiple identities affect your users’ experience of these impacts?
- To what extent will the issue(s) that you tackle become more prevalent, more complex, or more pronounced in coming years because of the environmental crises?
- What are the opportunities presented by social and environmental action to bring about positive changes for the people you serve and the environment?
Common concerns and how to address them
- ‘We’re not an environmental organisation’ The environmental crises are already affecting all charitable causes. Many of us in the social sector are experts in our cause, and building expertise on environmental issues can feel overwhelming. But you don’t need to become an expert on climate science. In fact, the expertise you already have is vitally needed in conversations on the environment.
- ‘I’m not a senior manager or trustee, how do I get this on the agenda?’ Use existing conversations, such as team meetings, risk register updates or PESTLE analysis, to raise these issues. Think about what you could do with a short amount of time and resource, for example asking for just five minutes on a senior management or board agenda. Consider what will influence your senior leaders – they might be persuaded by a summary of the evidence, or examples from peer organisations that appeal to their collaborative (or competitive) side!
- ‘There isn’t information out there’ The scientific impacts of the climate and nature crises are much better understood than the social impacts, and so yes, it may be difficult to understand how the people you serve will be impacted. Start with the resources listed here, including Everyone’s Environment research briefings which aim to bridge that gap. Think about where to find relevant data sources. Talk to and consult your users and peers. Once you have insight, share it. People like you will be crucial in building better understanding of the social impacts of the environmental crises and related policy.
In 2019 I became fully aware of the extent of the climate crisis, and I felt it was really important to do something, but I couldn’t initially see how that related to my day job. About a year after that it occurred to me that it was totally central to my day job, because Reach’s primary purpose is to support a thriving civil society and the climate crisis is going to be a massive issue for civil society as a whole. So it’s going to be central to our work.
Janet Thorne, CEO, Reach Volunteering
Case studies
Key resources
Impacts by social group
- Everyone’s Environment research briefings have information on how the climate and nature crises and related policy affects young people, older people, disabled people, people from ethnic minority communities, people experiencing poverty and people experiencing health inequalities. (NPC, 2023-24)
- These visual summaries of Everyone’s Environment research might help start conversations by providing the evidence in an easy to digest format. (NPC/Sketchnotes UK, 2024)
- Disability and Climate Justice (Dr Maria Kett, Gaya Sriskanthan and Ellie Cole on behalf of Open Society Foundations, 2021)
- Confronting Injustice: Racism and the Environmental Emergency (Runnymede Trust and Greenpeace UK, 2022)
Impacts by place
- To understand environmental impacts in your local area, UKCIP and Adaptation Scotland are a good place to start, or your local authority may have information to share.
- Local Intelligence Hub (Climate Coalition, 2024)
- Insight for local responses to the climate emergency (MySociety, 2024), including assessment of local authority climate action.
Building a core understanding
- In-depth Q&A: What is ‘climate justice’? (Carbon Brief, 2021)
- TED-Talk: 10 Years to Transform the Future of Humanity – or Destabilize the Planet (Johan Rockström, 2020)
- The Carbon Literacy Project and Climate Cafes can help you build an awareness of environmental impacts of everyday activities, and how to take action at an individual, community or organisational level.
- Environmental Philanthropy: Why social issue funders need to get involved – and where to begin (NPC, 2022)
- Acting on the Climate Crisis: Why, How and the Role of Philanthropy: A resource pack for funders (Environmental Funders Network and Association of Charitable Foundations)
- Engage your colleagues in conversations about how lives of those you support could be improved by environmental action. Try organising a meeting or ‘lunch and learn’ session. Share examples of where the climate and nature crisis have already been relevant to your work. Don’t worry if not everyone joins in at first—work with the ‘coalition of the willing’, and others will join in due course.
- Talk to the people that use your services about environmental issues. This might be through existing advisory groups or service delivery. Or it could mean asking existing or new funders for support to run consultations.
- Lead decision-making about the relevance of the environmental crises for your organisation. Ensure that conversations align with and advance your organisation’s overall strategy, complement the work of peers, and are sufficiently ambitious.
- While you may not be delivering work directly, support and encourage those who will be by allocating them time and resource.
- Be clear about who is responsible for action and where accountability sits, and set clear expectations around what will happen and when.
- Reflect with your team. Strategy refresh periods, team away days, quarterly reviews, and annual planning are all good opportunities to reflect together and start to integrate environmental issues into your work plans.
- Take time to discuss and reflect as a board on the strategic connections between the evidence and your organisation’s mission.
- Act as a sounding board for your CEO as they make decisions on how work will evolve.
Key questions
- How do you expect the environmental crises are going to affect your users?
- How could environmental action provide opportunities to address historic inequalities and/or prevent new inequalities from arising?
- How do you expect the environmental crises are going to affect your organisation and work?
- What does this future look like for your mission, strategy, programmes and influencing?
- How will the environmental crises impact your ability to deliver your work in the way that you currently do?
- What do the people you support, your peers, funders, and other key stakeholders feel about the impacts and their priorities for action?
Common concerns and how to address them
- ‘My organisation doesn’t want to give this time’ Be patient! You might not get everyone on board with this work first time around. As with any movement for change in the social sector, encouraging action will be an ongoing process. Do what you can to keep this issue on the agenda of key meetings and away days, and to apply the environmental lens to strategic conversations as they arise. Be prepared to be the one who asks ‘the environmental question’ when other things are being discussed. And find your friends in this cause (whether internally or externally): it can feel lonely, but there are others who are thinking the same. One of the responsibilities of those who can is to stand up and say that this is important, so that those who can’t do that so easily can join you.
- ‘There’s so much we could do’ As you reflect on the evidence, don’t feel pressure to jump to solutions. Future activity will be stronger if it is underpinned by a genuinely shared understanding and commitment. Once you get there, you may choose to articulate this shared understanding and commitment in a short statement, or within strategic documents. When you’re ready to act, it’s ok to take imperfect action based on this commitment, and to keep learning and improving.
- ‘We have to get our house in order first’ This is a common concern of many charities. Just as you don’t need to be an environmental science expert, you don’t have to be carbon neutral either. Change is an ongoing process and it’s ok to start with ‘good enough’.
Case studies
Key resources
Strategic reflection
- The Three horizons tool (cited in NPC’s Systems practice toolkit) is a useful method for envisaging long term change and how we can get there. Working through this exercise can be a pragmatic and positive way to draw connections between environmental and social issues and set a vision for the future you want to bring about.
- The FLOWER diagram (the Multisolving Institute) can help you to explore the potential co-benefits of action: how using one investment of time or effort may solve several problems at once. Working through this exercise alone or with peers might help you draw connections between ‘petals’ that you may see as your core mission, and ‘petals’ that historically you have disregarded as out of scope.
- There are organisations that help make space for this collective reflection, such as The Week or the Good Grief Network. Recognise that engaging with these issues may be emotional for yourself and your colleagues, but don’t try to avoid this. Emotional engagement with the issue and the changes that are coming can help secure a greater impetus for future work. Resources such as Andrew Boyd’s I Want a Better Catastrophe flowchart give a great example of balancing meaningful engagement with the environmental crises with humour and humanity.
Conversations with users
- The Everyone’s Environment findings briefings came from consultation with young people, Disabled people, older people and people from ethnic minority communities, and may be a useful starting point for understanding different views (NPC, 2023).
- The Everyone’s Environment conversations toolkit can help you discuss environmental topics with your users. In general, good practice in involvement requires a strategic approach, so if you can, try to build discussion around the environmental crises into your existing involvement mechanisms, rather than doing this as a one off.
- In some sectors, there will be specific research already conducted, like this research from Indigo for arts and culture.
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Evolve your programmes by chatting with people in your working day—inside and outside the organisation—about ways you can act to support the people you serve.
Every service your charity provides can evolve to incorporate environmental impacts, but it might not be obvious at first how this should happen. Help your colleagues think this through and take action.
For example, this might be sharing information about how to prepare for extreme weather events, or setting up a user group for those interested in supporting your organisation to act on environmental issues.
- Familiarise yourself with the common ‘discourses of climate delay’ used to slow environmental action. Familiarising yourself with these, understanding where they are being used in your organisation, and considering how to tackle these, may help accelerate action.
- Build unlikely coalitions. All too often, the needs of different social groups are used by governments and corporations as an excuse to delay environmental action. To counter this, we need to build unlikely coalitions: between the social and environmental sectors, and between charities working in different parts of the social sector (who are too often ‘siloed’). By working together, we can build momentum towards shared goals. For example, mental health organisations working with nature charities to deliver interventions for young people.
- When you are updating your organisational strategy, work with your board to embed this action within your strategic framework.
- Embed action in your strategy. Move beyond a programme-level response. Articulate how the organisation is going to evolve within your strategy. Committing at the strategic level ensures ongoing resourcing in this area. Crucially, it helps keep conversations about the impacts of the climate and nature crises on the agenda beyond the tenure of any one staff member or trustee.
- Hold your leadership team to account, ensuring that environmental impacts are considered in the design of new programmes and policy positions.
Key questions
- Looking at evidence from desk research and consultation, where are the obvious spaces for action?
- Where are the quick wins? Are these the same as the most important/impactful spaces that may need more planning, time, and resource to address? Will any of these quick wins hinder a longer-term response?
- What do you know you need to do but aren’t sure how to approach it? What are the known unknowns, and unknown unknowns? How, when, and with whom, could you explore these areas further?
- What can you do within your current strategy and programmes? And how/when will you evolve your strategy, programmes/services, and advocacy?
Common concerns and how to address them
- ‘I don’t know what to do—the issues are too massive’ It is better to start with some kind of action—and learn from it and grow your confidence—rather than to delay waiting for the perfect solution to what are complex issues. What is the added value that your organisation can bring to the wider societal response?
- ‘We don’t have the capacity to launch a new programme’ Action can range from small tweaks to your services, to transformative new initiatives. If capacity is a challenge, consider how you can evolve your existing work. For example, if you provide housing advice, you could train your advisors in climate impacts related to housing and housing adaptation support that is available, so that this can become part of your offer. You might campaign for new housing to be built to net zero standards to reduce fuel poverty and contribute to environmental targets.
- ‘I can’t resource this work’ Prioritising new services or capacity for programmes may, inevitably, mean trade-offs with other work. Given that inflows of new resources may be unlikely in the short term, consider what you can assign to this work, and what is feasible to deliver given this. It’s better to commit to less and grow an evidence base and impetus for future funding, than to overcommit and underdeliver. As above, integrating this into existing work may well be better—based on your understanding of how the environmental crises area linked to the problems that your work is already dealing with. To get started with planning, you might revisit your theory of change to see where action at the intersection of social and environmental issues could leverage the greatest impact on the outcomes you are seeking to achieve.
- ‘Our funders won’t support this work’ We know that there is not enough funding going to work at the intersection of social and environmental issues. Except for the sector’s most progressive funders, social funders and environmental funders alike see the intersection as out of scope. In the longer term, we hope that if more charities are vocal in this space and ask for funding for this work, funders will change their practice and direct more resource to this area.
- ‘Environmental action is outside of our charitable objects’ Taking action should not need changes to your governing document. The key is finding the relevant connections between the environmental crises and your existing charitable objects. The Charity Commission’s guidance on environmental responsibility for trustees applies specifically to charities whose objects do not mention the environment.
Case studies
- How Woodcraft Folk worked with peers on a sector response
- How Reach Volunteering placed environmental action at the core of its work
- How BBC Children in Need tweaked its support for grantees
- How the Race Equality Foundation embedded this work in their strategy
- How Disability Rights UK built unlikely coalitions
Key resources
How to act
- Follow a standard process of developing an organisational strategy, but with environmental impacts at the forefront of your mind. What kind of organisation do you want to be? Which areas will you prioritise? (NPC, 2024)
- Guidance on prioritising: why it’s important and how to get started (NPC, 2023) as well as practical prioritisation tools
- Acting on the Climate Crisis (Environmental Funders Network, 2021)
- Collaborating in response to climate change (Funders Collaborative Hub, 2022)
Public commitments
- Climate and environmental leadership principles (ACEVO, for charity leaders)
- Funder Commitment on Climate Change (ACF, for funders)
- Individual Philanthropy Commitment on Climate Change (Beacon, for philanthropists)
- The Climate Charter (ICRC and IFRC, for humanitarian organisations)
- Share learning. Given that many organisations will be going through this process in the coming months and years, share your learning internally and externally. This might be sharing with colleagues in a team meeting or away day. Or through talking to peers at one of our Learning Groups, sharing data about how your services in this area are being used, or being a case study as part of this Pathway for others to learn from.
- Be brave. Listen to feedback from colleagues about what is working and respond to this learning. Don’t worry if you don’t feel your next step is ‘perfect’. We can all learn from activity whether big or small, and from challenges as much as successes.
- Be transparent in your own learning and encourage others to do the same. Create a culture of continuous learning within your organisation where people feel supported in something doesn’t work well the first time.
- Incorporate environmental insight into strategic reviews. Learning and insight is essential to review the success of your organisational strategy. Environmental learning should be embedded into your process of strategic review as a board. In the same way as you monitor your progress on diversity, equity and inclusion, you should regularly revisit your progress on environmental issues. As part of this, make sure that you hold your CEO to account against objectives in this area.
Key questions
- What is changing in the national picture? Both in terms of direct impacts of environmental crises and policy impacts?
- Which social impacts of the environmental crises are we making progress on? Where are we having less impact?
- What are we hearing from our colleagues, peers, and the people we serve?
- What opportunities are emerging? What risks, or unintended consequences?
Common concerns and how to address them
- ‘I don’t know what others are doing’ Understanding where you fit in the ecosystem is important to any strategic planning, but over-analysis can delay action. Take a proportionate approach and be open to shared learning and collaboration as you go. No one individual, charity, or even nation, can tackle systemic issues alone—but every one of us has something to contribute.
- ‘I don’t know how to make sure our learning helps others’ As a starting point, you could share learning via social media or a blog post, or add reflections to your annual report. If you have key learning from your work, or know of good practice, resources or templates that could help others, please share them with us and we will help you.
Case studies
Key resources
How to measure
- The Cycle of Good Impact Practice can help you think about how to get started with measuring, understanding and improving your impact—approaches to learning don’t need to be specific to environmental work. (NPC)
Shared learning
- As part of Everyone’s Environment, we convene the Charity Learning Group and Funder Learning Group, to support knowledge sharing between organisations working in this space. You could come along to one of these drop in discussions or start your own for the sub-sector or type of work you are working on.
- Climate Emergency Working Group (ACEVO)
Glossary
The language of the environmental movement is sometimes controversial and often nuanced. Technical terms can deter the involvement of those whose voices we most need in environmental action, who may see this as inaccessible, demotivating, or irrelevant. However, using more general language can risk obscuring meaning and nuance.
In this guide, we use the following terms.
- Environmental crises: a term used to encompass both climate change and nature decline including biodiversity loss, toxics and pollution.
- Climate crisis/change: how human activity, particularly burning fossil fuels, is heating the planet and increasing overall average temperatures and with it the number of heatwaves, droughts, floods and storms.
- Nature loss/crisis/decline: how human activity is driving many plants and animals to extinction and interfering with the natural balance of ecosystems.
- Social impacts: the impacts of the environmental crises on humans.
- Environmental action: any activity by individuals, communities, or organisations that aims to tackle the environmental crises.
- Environmental policy: any intervention by governments to tackle the environmental crises, covering a range of policy areas including energy generation, travel, and housing.
- User: a person who has used or benefitted from a charity’s intervention or offer.
A lot of specialist organisations do work to understand what language motivates different groups in relation to the environmental crises, and we recommend that you explore their work, starting with this summary blog. You’ll also know best what language resonates with the people you support.
How the Pathway was developed
Everyone’s Environment would not be possible without the collaboration of our partners. Growing in number every day, they codesign the programme structure and activities with NPC, to make sure all work is as relevant, compelling, and impactful as possible.
We are grateful to the funders of Everyone’s Environment, who are committed to accelerating action on the social impacts of the environmental crises, and generously supported this work.
A group of advisors guided the development of this Pathway, drawing on their experience of doing this work in practice. Thank you to:
- Ben Twist, Creative Carbon Scotland
- Ellie Murtagh, British Red Cross
- Ellie Ward, Wildlife & Countryside Link
- Jabeer Butt, Race Equality Foundation
- Jamie Agombar, Students Organising for Sustainability UK
- Janet Thorne, Reach Volunteering
- Laura Alcock Ferguson, Freelance Consultant
- Roberta Fusco, ACEVO
At NPC, this guide was written by Liz Gadd, Naomi Chapman, Leah Davis and Emma Pearson.
Use, development and maintenance of the Pathway
This guide is licensed under Creative Commons to give you the right to share and use its content. As such, this work is licensed under CC BY 4.0. View a copy of this license. We hope that this collaborative approach allows the sector to benefit from the different strengths and experiences of each of our partners, and serve our collective goal of accelerating action on the social impacts of the environmental crises.
Please note that within this Pathway, we signpost to resources provided by other organisations. Use of these resources does not fall under the Creative Commons license, so make sure you adhere to the licensing of each of these resources individually.
Photo by Harry Grout on Unsplash
How to suggest additions or report broken links
As we navigate the social impacts of the environmental crises, we are navigating continuous change. This Pathway is by no means a finished output summarising best practice—but instead a distillation of what we’ve learnt over the last two years. As time goes on, we’re keen to add more resources, steps, and case studies to the Pathway. If you have any to suggest, please email EveryonesEnvironment@thinkNPC.org.
As you use the Pathway, if you find any links that are no longer working, please email EveryonesEnvironment@thinkNPC.org.
Reducing your carbon emissions
Everyone’s Environment focusses on charities tackling the social impacts of the environmental crises, so work to reduce your carbon footprint or reduce the environmental impact of your investments is not covered in this Pathway.
We think that charities can often change more by empowering under-served groups to play a role in environmental action while supporting them with the impacts they are already facing, than by reducing charities’ carbon footprints.
If you are looking to do reduce your carbon footprint, there are a lot of guides out there already:
- If you want to move towards Net Zero in your operations, look at Going Green Together, Climate Confidence Scotland, or this guide to Climate Solutions at Work.
- If you want to move your investments out of fossil fuels, look at Fuelling Positive Change (NCVO).
Related items
Resources
The Everyone’s Environment conversations toolkit
By David Ford, Graham Duxbury, Naomi Chapman, and Liz Gadd .
On 11 September 2024.
This toolkit can help you discuss environmental topics with your users.
Resources
The Everyone’s Environment Pathway: Case Studies
On 28 August 2024.
These case studies illustrate the four steps of the Everyone's Environment Pathway with the real experiences of charities.
Initiative we’re working on
Everyone’s Environment Programme
On 28 February 2023.
Working with over 80 social and environmental charities to empower people from the UK’s diverse social groups on how we confront the climate and nature crises.
