What happened?

Through the Big Green Challenge, we aimed to uncover what support communities needed 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 then put their ideas into practice to compete for the £1m prize. After evaluating the success of the finalists, a panel of judges chose the winners and they were announced in February 2010.

The finalists reduced CO2 emissions in their communities by between 10–46% in the Big Green Challenge delivery year.

Watch the video detailing the aims of the challenge and featuring the 10 finalists:

The winners

The Big Green Challenge showcased some extraordinary examples of people and groups working in communities to tackle climate change. The winners of the Big Green Challenge each received £300,000 to develop their community-based carbon reduction schemes further. The winners were:

The Green Valleys, Brecon

Isle of Eigg, Green Island

Household Energy Service, Ludlow

There was also one runner-up, receiving £100,000:

Low Carbon West Oxford

What did we learn?

Following the Big Green Challenge we produced an evaluation report detailing what we learned from running the project. You can read the full evaluation document, but below are a few key lessons we took away from the project:

• Outcome (performance) based funding should be considered as an additional option to traditional grant funding of community action. It has the potential to mobilise community resources and to accelerate change.
• Spotting and rewarding success can help communities to mobilise more resource than they might be able to do on their own.
• Providing small grants to pilot the delivery of innovative ideas is a useful model for selecting organisations with the most potential; but the administrative burdens on those taking part need to be kept in proportion to the risk that they will get no further funding.
• Communities provide a resource for real and measurable change that can complement and work alongside ‘top-down’ interventions and behaviour change programmes.

As well as producing an evaluation report we also created a guide on how to use social prize challenges to promote "people-powered public services".

Download the Social Challenge Prize Guide