Big Green Challenge

The Big Green Challenge show cased some extra-ordinary examples of people and groups working in communities to tackle climate change. At a time when action on climate change is ever more urgent and there are calls from government for communities to take more of a lead in civil society, there is an increasing demand to understand how these extra-ordinary communities can contribute to galvanising further action in other communities; turning 'dormant' communities into 'working' communities.

Building on the some of what we learned about community led innovation with our Big Green Challenge,  we are exploring how to achieve scale, replication and growth in community projects. How do communities diffuse their ideas across to other communities and what support can be given to rapidly accelerate this process?

Big Green Challenge Diffusion

In partnership with the University of Bath and 25 successful community innovators, the ambition is to create a dynamic learning environment, where participants can develop some great ideas for scaling and replicating their own work and significantly lower the barriers for other groups to take up the challenge of addressing resilience and sustainability in their communities. For ideas which capture the imagination and offer sound theories of change, NESTA will be funding some community groups to test their ideas in the field.

We're gaining plenty of insight on just how different some of the motivations of community innovators are to take action on climate change, and how this results in a widely diverse approach to scale and diffusion of their work. It's clear that through a co-operative, inquiring process it is possible to instil the same kind of energy and creativity as is present in the process of innovation, and the participants in the programme have no shortage of ambition in their desire to see radical change across communities in the UK.

About the Big Green Challenge

The Big Green Challenge is NESTA’s £1 million challenge prize designed to stimulate and support community-led responses to climate change.

Through the Big Green Challenge, we aim to uncover what support these communities need to transform their bright ideas into viable solutions that will improve all of our lives.

In early 2008, 355 groups came forward with a wide range of imaginative and practical ideas for reducing CO2 emissions in their communities.

We selected 100 of the most promising groups, who received support from the Big Green Challenge team to develop their ideas into detailed plans. From this group, we shortlisted ten finalists who are now putting their ideas into practice to compete for the £1 million prize.

They had until October 2009 to reduce CO2 emissions in their community.