Ashden

Research and policy / expert engagement to support application for a £10m grant  

Challenge 

Ashden is a leading international charity taking on the challenge of the climate crisis. The team at Ashden’s Let’s Go Zero campaign are taking up a mission to make the UK schools estate greener, cleaner and more appropriate for the twenty-first century. The team were looking for two levels of support: firstly, to develop out their research basis in order to build a formal government-oriented manifesto; then secondly to develop an investable proposition and structure for the next steps of their campaign, in order to support engagement with a major donor.  

 

Project 

We have worked with the Let’s Go Zero campaign on several projects to support the research background for their work in UK schools. Initially, we were commissioned to undertake a detailed literature review on the co-benefits of upgrading the UK schools estate to ready it for the climate crisis, including health and wellbeing, student attainment, and local economy outcomes.  

This work enabled Ashden to further develop out its research-led manifesto and to engage with government and other key stakeholders, building the economic case for taking action and investing in UK schools.  

Our second project with Ashden ramped up our engagement with the charity and helped us support them more holistically, moving from research to proposition development.  The team were keen to understand how to engage with qualitative and quantitative research and expert opinions to set out a plan for how they would structure their activities in schools, given a certain (hypothetical) donor budget. We started with a detailed literature review, and used this to structure and facilitate a suite of external expert engagement sessions. Using an options prioritisation framework and scoring system, we developed a portfolio of activities for investment from Ashden’s donor. 

 

Outcome 

Using our recommendations, the Ashden team was able to put forward a strong portfolio of activities to their donor, and secured a game-changing grant that enabled the team to take their activities in UK schools to the next stage.  

 

Why we loved this project 

At Ever, we pride ourselves on the quality and impact of our research, and we love undertaking research-led projects. We know that sustainability is about opportunity, and exploring and quantifying the co-benefits and unexpected positive outcomes of greening the schools estate allowed us to get under the skin of the literature which supports this. The outcome of a large grant to support Ashden to take its important work to the next level was hugely rewarding for the Ever team. 

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