It is busy at The 2 Minute Foundation with campaigning, inspiring people and businesses to change how they act, educating, collecting evidence…but times are tough, and it’s become clear that the charity needs money to keep going. In the 2 Minute newsletter this week CEO, Nicky Green, wrote to supporters to ask for help.
When I took over the role as CEO in March, I said that I would approach it with honesty and authenticity.
So here goes:
We need your help. Please can you donate to us so that we can continue to be here for you and the planet after the Summer?
It really has got to this point.
We have never asked for money, and we vowed that we never would, but times have changed and we really need you. I know that this is not an easy ask. The team and I understand the current cost of living rises and the impact that Covid is still having on many of us. But we also know what 2 Minute can do. And we want to carry on working together with you to save our beautiful planet.
If you are able to give a monthly donation to help us continue, then please do so here.
When you are fast asleep, Dolly (our social media gatekeeper) is propped up in bed, usually at 3am, tea by her side, scrolling through your messages. She engages, likes and shares posts from all over the world. She’s overjoyed by the love and admiration that you have for your community and the planet and shares the feedback with the team each day. She is the human being behind the squares. She is always there for you and we don’t want this to stop. She is the beating heart of what we do and who we are.
But my, have we grown! From one hashtag, we are now a charity, doing really great things. Over the last year we have worked with 10 corporates, educating them about marine plastic and what they can do to help protect the planet. We worked with a further 20 businesses to spread our 2 Minute message through their organisations to staff and customers and encourage more people to take part in small planet positive actions that all add up to make a big difference. Our inland campaigns #2MinuteLitterPick and #2MinuteStreetClean tackle litter and plastic pollution at source. We run The 2 Minute Beach School which has reached almost 1,000 children and young people. We’ve delivered 175 face to face sessions on the beach this year and reached a further 250 local school children. 100% of our students reported that they feel more connected to the environment after attending our sessions.
Our online resources and lessons from the beach were a saviour to parents and carers in lockdown. We received feedback such as “my child would not concentrate on screen unless it was your sessions…what a joy for my child and for me (!) to see the interesting experiments and facts. You brought a little bit of positivity into our day”. The 2 Minute Beach School picks up litter after each session and has already collected 450kg of it this year. Our educational arm is growing, and we have aspirations to go inland into cities and reach more people with a 2 Minute tour.
We have an app that has enabled us to log 131,375 pieces of litter. It gives us live data about what is being picked up across the globe in real time. The relaunch of the app this Autumn will help us build this citizen science programme to make top-down change. We have over 1,000 clean up stations including our circular recycled station range, that reduce litter by 61% and are stocked up with repurposed bags made from tents. To date we have made over 1,700 tent bags from 250 broken tents diverted from landfill (and counting!). We have supported and trained 34 Guardian Angel volunteers to conduct beach cleans and outreach work from these stations in their own communities across Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, London, Yorkshire and Northern Ireland. And we want to do more…
Picking up litter and using the hashtag is powerful activism in itself – thank you for your dedication. Since the start of our #2Minute clean up campaigns we have removed over 400 tonnes of litter out of harm’s way. That’s an immense amount of litter that is not going on to entangle wildlife, break down in the environment or eventually end up in the food chain. We have done this together and now we’re asking you for a donation, so that we can be there for you in the future, remove more tonnes of litter, educate more children and inspire more people to take action.
We don’t just want to be a number on a list of charities that couldn’t make it through the pandemic, in the hangover from a turbulent 2021, with delayed programmes and lack of funding. We want to be here for you, for the long run.
You know the feeling of picking up your phone to see that we have liked a post or shared a story, right? You know how it feels to get a hello, or to get a love heart emoji or a wave, spurring you on to do a talk or set up a community group or help to navigate your way through this crucial decade of climate change?
It’s validation. It’s community. It’s belonging.
The charity has achieved so much since I started nearly 8 years ago. I remember the hard graft that Martin, Dolly and I put in from the get-go, sitting at Martin’s kitchen table, writing funding applications, working on the accounts or wrapping up a product from the shop. I love meeting strangers, whose eyes light up when I say that I work at The 2 Minute Foundation, and hearing how they have a station near them that has been the catalyst for change in their communities.
I remember so much – Dolly bursting into tears at such beautiful words sent to us on social media, our first t-shirt range that flew off the shelves, being on cloud-9 after meeting astronaut Tim Peake, who loves the simple concept of our #2MinuteBeachClean campaign and picks up litter with his family every day.
I remember the hundreds of clean ups, the days spent at beach school and going to our station production site to see the first coffee cup station ever made. I remember the euphoria of watching each TV appearance and press article printed, like the ad for #2MinuteBeachClean on the back page of Surfers Path, and seeing your posts using the #2MinutesOfPositivity campaign through lockdown – each memory and act growing the community and building momentum.
This is the inspiring, the exciting, the impact that the charity has made and is making – all from a grassroots movement, together, with you.
And we don’t want that impact to stop, so the time has come for us to ask, ask you, our amazing family of followers, to set up a monthly donation and give what you are able – to see this amazing young environmental charity flourish. Just think what we can achieve together over the next 10 years.
So, if you can donate, it would mean the absolute world to us and secure the protection of it, for you and for future generations.
Thank you
Love Nicky x
CEO
The 2 Minute Foundation blog 