COUNCIL SEEKING COMMUNITY CLIMATE REPORTERS
Richmond Council has launched an innovative ‘Community Reporting’ scheme, which will allow the views and opinions of people across the borough to help frame its new Climate Strategy for 2025-2030.
To help bring feedback opportunities directly into local communities, the Council is looking to recruit 18 people to act as Community Reporters.
These residents will be selected to represent the diversity of the borough and speak to a wide variety of people who live, work and study in their local area within the borough about their views and habits concerning climate change.
Reporters will dedicate a maximum of 28 hours over the course of 10 to 12 weeks (between August and October) as part of the scheme—including several hours of specialist training on how to effectively engage with their community—and be compensated for their time to London Living Wage equivalent via vouchers.
The scheme will play a vital role in gathering, and reporting back to the Council, the perspectives of the local community on topics related to climate change. The Council will then use these views and insights to directly shape its new Climate Strategy for 2025-30.
Cllr Julia Neden-Watts, Chair of the Environment, Sustainability, Culture and Sports Committee, said: “The Community Reporter scheme represents an important opportunity for residents to directly influence our developing climate strategy.
“By hearing from local people who live, work or study in each of our unique communities, we can create a more robust and effective plan of action that reflects the diversity of needs, concerns and perspectives. We encourage all interested residents to apply and be part of this important initiative.”
Community Reporters will aim to get to the heart of the habits, beliefs and attitudes of local people.
They will gather insights into key aspects of people’s lives which impact, or are impacted, by climate change—for instance, the way people travel across the borough, heat their homes, go about their shopping or manage their gardens.
These insights – combined with broader reporting the Council has undertaken to understand what specific measures need to be taken to become a Net Zero borough by 2043 – will help inform the drafting and focus of the Council’s new Climate Strategy to cover the next five years.
The new strategy is scheduled for publication in June 2025.
All Community Reporters will have provided their final set of insights to the Council before the end of 2024, to ensure they are fed directly into the drafting stage.
This follows the Council’s previous Climate Emergency Strategy, launched in 2019, which was the first strategy to outline the Council’s approach to addressing climate change in the borough, as well as its commitment to becoming carbon neutral as an organisation by 2030.
People interested in applying for the Community Reporting scheme or finding out more can do so at the Council’s website: https://www.richmond.gov.uk/community_reporters
