Red Cross Reduce: A sustainability ideas challenge
Written with Brid Brosnan
The Innovation Hub and Green Pillar team are excited to launch Red Cross Reduce, an organisation wide ideas challenge. We want your ideas on how to remove, redesign or replace wasteful practices across the organisation.
As part of our 2030 strategy, we have committed to becoming an environmentally sustainable organisation. This means changing how we work to support people in crisis, how we travel and what we use so that we can manage our carbon impact.
Got an idea already? Submit it straight away here.
What do we mean by waste?
In this case, waste means anything that is unnecessary or unsustainable.
We are not just looking for tips on how to reduce what we send to landfill and lower our bin collection cost, we want your insights on the things we should cut out or change. Are there any behaviours, practices, materials or ways of working that we should reconsider to help us achieve our sustainability goals?
As we work to support people in crisis, there are some less sustainable activities that we absolutely need to do. For example, we need to keep our ambulance fleet on the road so we can help people home from hospital.
Why don’t you come up with these ideas yourselves?
The very best ideas come from people ‘on the shop floor’. Those who are closest to a problem often already have the best ideas on how to fix it. So we are asking everyone to contribute ideas, big or small, on how we could remove, redesign or replace wasteful practices on your ‘shop floor.’
We also know that people in the Red Cross are particularly passionate about sustainability. In our 2019 ideas challenge, 10% of all ideas were related to our environmental impact.
Got any examples?
Absolutely! You might have heard about the innovation teams work to support women who’ve experienced displacement into work through Leaps & Grounds, the social enterprise coffee pod.
We piloted Leaps & Grounds in September 2021, and it delivered great results for service users, customers and volunteers. However, it also created a huge amount of waste in the form of coffee grounds.
Every day we were throwing away kilos of coffee grounds. We didn’t yet have any organic waste facilities available at our location, so this organic waste was going to landfill. As an organisation, we had no particular use for the coffee grounds and so we just let this wasteful practice continue for a few weeks.
We identified that this was a problem that was only going to grow. So we came up with the idea of donating our coffee grounds to a local community garden.
Now, all the waste coffee we use gets given to them every couple of weeks. This reduces the amount of waste that goes into landfill, and the plants that are grown in the garden helps to absorb CO2 from the air.
Didn’t you run one of these before?
Yes! We ran a financial sustainability ideas challenge in 2019 — read about that here. We also launched a sustainability ideas challenge in early 2020, but due to COVID-19 we never got to finish it.
We still have all the ideas and we’re reviewing them as part of launching Red Cross Reduce.
How do I get involved?
Red Cross Reduce will be live from April 11th until the 20th of May. Whether you’re a lifelong volunteer, a new member of staff or anything in the middle, we want you to share your ideas to help us prune wasteful practices. These can be any size, from small changes you could implement straight away, to big transformation ideas that could redesign how we work.
- Got an idea already? Submit it straight away here. You can enter the ideas challenge as many times as you like!
- Want to get the creative juices flowing? Come along to one of our virtual ideation sessions. Everyone’s welcome.
- Want to work on an idea with your team? Leave us your details here and we’ll email over a resource pack.
- Done something about this problem already? Share your story with us here. Every example helps others come up with better solutions.
We will also be hosting open invite office hours every week (Tuesdays and Thursdays) until the end of May, so feel free to pop along on if you have any questions or just fancy a chat. We can’t wait to see what you come up with!
As ever, send us an email (lizzieosullivan@redcross.org.uk and bridbrosnan@redcross.org.uk) if you’d like to chat.
