Environment 2009
This award will highlight the hundreds of campaigners working to provide sustainable solutions to the environmental problems we face locally and globally.
This award is sponsored by Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation
Winner
Shilpa Shah
‘Akashi’, Cambridge Carbon Footprint
Akashi, which means ‘to the sky’, is a grassroots campaign that aims to empower Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) and faith groups to act on climate change and climate justice. Akashi aims to achieve more legitimacy for the environmental movement and a louder voice for people beyond ‘the usual suspects’. The campaign organises within minority groups to empower diverse and marginalised communities to take individual and collective action on what they see as the biggest global problem facing us today.
Finalists
Sheridan Chilvers
‘Food for Thought’, Students in Free Enterprise
‘Food for Thought’ is a programme that aims to encourage students from the University of Nottingham to grow food in their student gardens. These gardens represent an underutilised source of food production which would benefit students and low income families through the donation of surplus food. Sheridan’s vision is that students will develop an interest and passion about growing food from when they first start university, which they will carry on throughout their lives.
Kate Meakin
Cardiff Transition Project
Kate is working to increase awareness about climate change and organising community projects that will reduce the carbon footprint of Cardiff. Her work involves capacity building for volunteers who have an interest in green issues but are unsure how to turn concerns into action. Kate will be organising workshops, training and speaker events to give people the tools they need to become successful campaigners. This will be done in partnership with Stop Climate Chaos Cymru.
Award judges
John Cracknell
Jon has worked with the family of the late Sir James Goldsmith since 1993, and has managed the family's environmental grant-making and other philanthropy since 1998. A political sciences graduate from the University of Cambridge, with a Masters in Mass Communications from the University of Leicester, Jon has worked on environmental issues for seventeen years.
He is currently the director of the JMG Foundation, which funds environmental campaigns on a range of issues, including climate change. Since 2003 Jon has helped the Goldsmith family to set up three other grant-making structures, all funding environmental initiatives, primarily in Europe. He manages these day-to-day in addition to the JMG Foundation.
In 2003 Jon helped set up the Environmental Funders Network in the UK (www.greenfunders.org) which he coordinates on a part-time basis. The network brings together 80 foundations that fund on conservation and environmental issues. Jon has co-authored three detailed reports (the Where The Green Grants Went series) analysing environmental grant-making patterns and the sources of income for environmental groups in the UK.
He has also been actively engaged in the US Environmental Grantmakers Association since 1998, serving on the EGA Board since February 2008, and on the steering committee of the Funders Network on Trade and Globalization since its inception in 1999.
Emily Robinson
Emily is a former award winner of the Health and Social Care award category with her campaign to improve levels of nursing care for special care baby units. Emily is currently Campaigns Manager at Consumers International and has been the Foundations Trustee since the beginning of this year.
Lucy Pearce
Lucy is a Campaign Leader for the Stop Climate Chaos coalition. Since graduating with a 2:1 honours degree in African & Caribbean Studies, Lucy has worked as a professional campaigner for ten years. Starting out as General Secretary of Kent Students' Union, she has since worked for People & Planet, Christian Aid and the World Development Movement. Building on her track record of developing winning campaigns, including getting 60 universities to switch to green electricity and kicking the world's biggest oil company, Esso, off campus, she has also organised the UK's biggest ever demonstration on climate change.
