Survey Report: Sustainability in the Not-For-Profit Sector
At Prospectus we are on a journey to discover more about what sustainability means to us, our team and our community.
We have recently assessed our scope 1 and 2 emissions for 2022 and are currently exploring how we assess our scope 3 emissions. We have joined Fit for the Future, a sustainability network housed in the National Trust, and we are actively considering what kitemark accreditation we might work towards to assess, underpin and qualify meaningful sustainability actions.
All of this activity and understanding will help us deliver our sustainability work in an authentic, transparent and impactful way, building internal engagement and allowing us to take the proactive steps we need to take to reduce our carbon emissions and achieve Net Zero target for Prospectus of 2035.
In addition to the actions we are taking internally, we are keen to amplify voices and knowledge on sustainability externally. To support that strand of our work we put together a short survey to help us better understand the perceptions and values of sustainability in our community. In addition, we included some questions within the survey that covered protected characteristics in order to understand the intersectionality of sustainability and diversity.
We were very pleased to have 248 responses to our survey with a diverse range of respondents. You can see the full survey report below, but we wanted to pull out some key findings below:
What is clear is that there is a strong view that sustainability should be a key consideration for all organisations and good sustainability credentials make an organisation an attractive place to work with c. 95% of people agreeing with this statement.
However, only around half of the people surveyed knew their organisation had a net zero target or sustainability strategy. Could this be an opportunity for recruitment and retention?
In terms of responsibility and engagement we found it very interesting that there was big swing from 56.7% of people thinking the ‘whole staff team are responsible’ for implementing sustainability but in fact 75.9% of people think the ‘whole staff team should be responsible’ devolving across the whole team.. This swing was also largely a result of taking the responsibility from the Leadership team, which dropped from 38% in ‘are responsible’ to 17.5% in ‘should be responsible’. A potentially rare instance in not pushing responsibility for action “up” and real opportunity for team engagement.
Patagonia was the most referenced organisation that people admired for their sustainability credentials but there was an exhaustive list of over 240 different organisations. We were pleased to see one person mention Prospectus too!
When you considered the responses in the context of different diversity characteristics there was no significant swing in responses – a person’s ethnicity. gender, sexual orientation, age or social class did not indicate any trends in response – sustainability was equally valued by all.
If you would like to receive a fully accessible version, please contact us here.
