Written by: Barney Jeffries

Ethical job seekers have the opportunity to apply their skills and demonstrate their commitment to the environment by entering a competition to reduce carbon emissions in the community.

The Big Green Challenge aims to get people working together to come up with a way of reducing CO2 emissions in their local area by 60% over 12 months.

The competition is a great way for ethical job seekers to demonstrate to employers that they've done something practical to prove their passions and skills.

“We'll ask the 10 finalists of the competition to implement their ideas, prove they work, that they're sustainable and an external team will check the carbon reductions,” says Ravi Kapur, head of innovation challenges at Nesta, an organisation supporting innovation in science, technology and the Arts which is running the competition.

“We know that communities all over the country are working to reduce their carbon emissions. For example, a community come up with a scheme to retrain unemployed people to be installers of energy saving products in people's homes and sports groups have introduced car pooling schemes to get to matches.”

Individuals aren't eligible to enter the competition. It's open to “communities” which Kapur says includes online communities, organisations with connections to universities, groups who have a common interest and charities too. Groups will need to be formally constituted as “not-for-profit”, something Kapur says Nesta and UnLtd, a charity supporting social entrepreneurs which is helping run the competition, can advise on.

There's a big cash incentive for people to get involved — a £1 million prize “fund” for the winning group to spend “appropriately for the benefit of their whole community”.

The deadline for applications is 29 February 2008. Application forms will be available on The Big Green Challenge website in January.

The Big Green Challenge
www.biggreenchallenge.org.uk

Nesta
www.nesta.org.uk

UnLtd
www.unltd.org.uk

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