Supporting footballers to raise awareness of climate change: Football For Future and The Dixon Foundation
Football For Future (FFF) are partnering with The Dixon Foundation to support football personalities to become ‘Climate Champions’, as part of the foundation’s ‘Reaching Outside Our Echo Chamber’ challenge.
Climate Champions are individuals who use their platform to stand up for the planet. They are football personalities, ranging from professional players to managers, retired players, and famous fans of the game.
FFF can provide Climate Champions with:
Climate education and communication support according to the Champion’s schedule / level of interest, consisting of:
training sessions.
handbooks.
informal calls.
Support speaking out, including:
social media graphics.
Climate Champion videos.
panel and media appearances.
Support taking action, including:
stakeholder (club, sponsor etc) mapping and liaison (value alignment analysis).
partner signposting - and wider collaborations where possible.
Champion to Champion support, including:
safe, collaborative spaces to speak with other Champions and share learnings/ challenges.
public support for one another.
team appearances.
Our Champions department - consisting of climate communication experts, professional players and player agents - has built an attractive and credible brand for environmentally conscious players to engage with on this issue.
To date, we have supported three footballers to become FFF Climate Champions.
Katie Rood, Heart of Midlothian
David Wheeler, Wycombe Wanderers
Bruno Saltor Grau, former captain and current coach of Brighton & Hove Albion
“I’ve loved connecting with the team at FFF. They’ve helped to give me a platform to communicate about the things I’m passionate about. They make awesome content to support my message and give sustainability a cool twist.”
Last year, we partnered with Nike Football, Chelsea and Spurs, producing a FFF video campaign that was shared across all partners’ Instagram channels, for which we provided a script for Mason Mount (Chelsea), who became the highest-profile English player to publicly advocate for environmental sustainability.
This partnership will allow us to scale up our existing climate education and communication training for professional football players, with the ultimate goal of growing a community of football influencers who we can work with on ambitious, sustainability-focused projects.
The Dixon Foundation is a UK-based charity that backs bold initiatives working to help people and our natural world flourish together.
“FFF are very excited to partner with The Dixon Foundation to accelerate our Climate Champions programme. This project is an exciting opportunity to activate and support some new – and incredibly influential – voices in the climate conversation to break the climate echo-chamber and redefine what it means to be someone who cares about the planet.”