Project Dirt

Project Dirt is a grass roots social networking site that enables people and organisations to give their time, expertise and resources to local environmental projects.

Website: www.projectdirt.com

Project Dirt has grown through word of mouth to become one of the UK's biggest environmental networks.  Centred on environmental projects, the site accommodates everything from community food growing schemes, green energy groups, conservation, and waste reduction pilots through to teaching tracking skills.

With over 5,000 members, 700 projects and at least 50 events a week, the attention is on what people and organisations do rather than say.

The core focus is to make it easy for members to bring about tangible environmental change in their local area.  There are two ways for this to happen. Firstly, individual projects can organise activities through project pages, promote activity or find help (expertise, advice, resources, and volunteers) locally via the online platform. Secondly, people interested in getting involved and helping a project can see who's doing what in their local area - and connect with them.

Companies are also in on the act. Timberland has used Project Dirt by providing micro grants and employees as volunteers to certain projects. The Mayor of London now has three programmes using Project Dirt and Wandsworth Council runs its eco-grant scheme on the site.

A new website is being built to take Project Dirt to ten cities across the UK and engage further companies and organisations. The launch is expected in Spring 2012 and will offer better search, community clusters and upgraded project pages.

The Award: Project Dirt has been awarded £110,000 to support the rollout of Project Dirt and to develop the functionality of the web platform including a system for facilitating the giving of time, money and resources in direct response to project needs, a badge/reward system and a better matching service.

Contacts

• Nick Gardner: Co-Founder and Director
• Mark Shearer: Co-Founder and Director
• Richard Goat: Non-Executive Director/Advisor