When Sarah Butler-Sloss founded Ashden in 2001, she understood something the rest of the world is still catching up with: the climate crisis does not have a solutions problem. It has a scale problem. That founding insight has guided this organisation for 25 years. It is also what draws me here now. It is an honour to take the baton from Sarah and lead the board into its next chapter.

I have spent six years working with some of the world’s leading businesses on climate action. The solutions exist. What has been missing is the means to find them, trust them, and back them at the speed and scale the crisis demands. For 25 years, that is precisely what Ashden has been building. And right now, it matters more than ever.

Proven, working climate solutions

For more than two decades, Ashden has shown that the solutions we need are already there. And that with the right support, including from Ashden itself, they can scale for even greater impact.

Think of the entrepreneurs bringing affordable clean energy to Africa’s villages – powering higher incomes and living standards. Or the staff and children at UK schools  –  millions of them greening their classrooms and outdoor spaces, creating inspiring environments, and reducing energy bills. Or Indigenous communities protecting tropical forests, often more effectively than vast institutions and global programmes. This is the work that Ashden enables.

These are not pilots. They are not proofs of concept. They are working solutions, built by people with deep knowledge of their communities, their landscapes, and what actually needs to happen. The problem is that the systems around them – finance, policy, media, business – have been consistently slow to find them, trust them, and back them at scale.

When Sarah created Ashden, she was responding to a frustration that anyone working in this space will recognise. She kept finding extraordinary projects – small, local, often led by people from the communities they served – that were delivering results nobody was replicating, because nobody was paying attention.

It is an insight that has long resonated at the very highest levels. Not least with Ashden’s long-standing patron HM The King. Speaking at the Ashden Awards in 2009, he said: “If we are to be successful in somehow reconciling the immense and daunting challenge of rising numbers of people with the diminishing capacities of our planet, and in dealing with the scourge of climate change, then it is not only new clean technologies that will be needed; it is also the inspiration of the people who help change to occur.”

That is exactly what Ashden does. It finds the people who help change to occur – and makes sure the world cannot ignore them.

Ashden’s unique role

Ashden is sometimes undersold – including, occasionally, by itself. More than an eminent awards programme. More than a grant-maker. More than a consultancy, or campaign. Though it does all these things exceptionally well, its impact comes from bringing these tools and approaches together – making them more than the sum of their parts. That’s how Ashden has spent a quarter of a century doing the hard, essential work of finding climate solutions that can change the world and empowering them to do just that.

That work takes many forms. It is the Ashden Awards, the original climate showcase, now in their 26th year, finding extraordinary innovators in the UK and the Global South and giving them the profile, connections and resources to scale.

It is Let’s Go Zero, the national movement that has mobilised more than 5,500 schools It is Ashden’s policy influence – recommendations adopted this year in three UK government strategies: the Warm Homes Plan, the Local Power Plan and the Education Estates Strategy.

It is our work in refugee settlements in Uganda, Kenya and Ethiopia, backing organisations led by displaced people themselves. A vital intervention, given that 94% of those living in settlements have no meaningful access to electricity.

These are just some of Ashden’s many achievements.

My goals: a more visible, better resourced, more confident Ashden

I have spent 25 years building and leading mission-driven organisations, from St John Ambulance to Smart Energy GB, where I led the national consumer campaign that that enabled UK homes to adopt smart energy technology. Most recently, I created Pinwheel – a business built on the conviction that the way corporates engage with climate action can be changed and harnessed for exponential impact.

I bring experience of national behaviour change, corporate relationships, and the high-integrity approach to climate finance that I believe is the right model for the years ahead.

I come to this new role with a great deal of humility. Ashden’s executive and trustee team, its award winners, its long-standing funders and its founder Sarah Butler-Sloss have built something remarkable. My job as Chair is not to change what Ashden is. It is to help it become more fully itself. More visible, better resourced, and more confident in the distinctive, radical, evidence-backed idea at the heart of everything it does.

The solutions exist. Let’s make sure the world finds them – and that they find a world eager and able to adopt them.