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In each episode of Sustainability Insiders, Kevin Hegarty speaks to business leaders to find out how they're making their companies more sustainable. In season two, Camilla Smith, from specialist sustainability recruiter Sustii, shares what candidates and employers are looking for in this fast‑growing talent marketplace. Ian O’Donnell MBE, from the Federation of Small Businesses, talks about the challenges - and opportunities - small businesses face in operating sustainably. And one of the sector’s standout leaders, Mary Aladegbola, breaks down how she navigates net-zero challenges across NHS England. Other guests include ESG lead Ewan Donald from engineering business Ipsum, and Graham Duxbury, Chief Executive of Groundwork. Hopefully each of their stories will inspire you on your sustainability journey, and give you the ideas and tools you need to make your own company more sustainable in the very near future.
Hi, and welcome to Sustainability Insiders, the podcast that talks to business leaders to find out how they're making their companies more sustainable. I'm Kevin Hegarty, and I work at Cadent, a UK energy network that's on its own sustainability journey. In this episode, I'm joined by Graham Duxbury, Chief Executive of Groundwork. In our chat, Graham tells me about the employment opportunities within the sustainability space. He gives me real world examples of how businesses and partners are working together to positive effect.
Kevin Hegarty:And he outlines the support Groundwork offers to businesses. So welcome Graham to Sustainability Insiders the podcast.
Graham Duxbury:Thank you for having me. It's delightful to be here.
Kevin Hegarty:So Graham, you're the CEO of Groundwork, which is a federation of independent charities, and it's all about supporting local communities and business to build capacity and resilience. So what does that really mean in practice? Well that's about getting people into jobs and supporting growth of the green economy. Now our paths crossed when there was a parliamentary event only in recent months, which talked about this being an absolute perfect opportunity to focus on the opportunities that are presented to us by the net zero ambitions of this country and sustainability in particular. Talk to me about what that report that you launched in parliament was all about and why we are right now at a perfect opportunity to grasp getting people into work in this green economy space.
Graham Duxbury:I'd absolutely love to do that. I'm gonna take you back for a bit of a history lesson first just about our organization to understand why we've got to where we've got to and why this is so important to us. So we were set up at a very specific point in time in the late seventies, early eighties, when communities were being impacted by what was called at the time deindustrialization. So the kind of loss of heavy industries. But that was also a time when we had the first stirrings of consciousness about things like global warming and climate change, not that it was called climate change at the time.
Graham Duxbury:And our mission as an organization, the experiment that we were set up to deliver was if you can support people to make a practical, tangible difference to the environmental neglect and blight and decline that was left behind in those communities, can that also be a springboard to economic prospects, greater kind of social cohesion, etcetera, etcetera? So can you rebuild communities from those kind of very practical starting points from the grassroots up, if you like? And we're still about that. We started off as a little experiment on Merseyside, and we have grown now into this national network of organizations held together as a federation. And that bit about how do you make sure that we're advancing and promoting a sustainability agenda, but also doing that in a way that creates prospects and skills and jobs for people is fundamentally important to what we are and who we are.
Graham Duxbury:So we talk now about green homes, green jobs, green communities, and the jobs bit has really come to the fore recently, not least because you'll have seen that there's been a flurry of recent government announcements about getting young people in particular back into work. And that happens on a fairly cyclical basis when the number of young people not in work ticks up towards a million as as it does do from time to time, then there is a a response. There's a reaction from politicians as a moral imperative to do something about that. We saw it after the financial crash. We saw it during the pandemic.
Graham Duxbury:Schemes to try and support young people into work become, again, something that government pays attention to. But our conviction is that if you're gonna do that and if you're gonna intervene in the labor market in that way and if you're gonna put public money into use to try and create jobs or create new training opportunities, you should be doing it with as much purpose as possible. And as far as I'm concerned, helping that transition to an economy that's more sustainable and regenerative is one of those big missions that we all have. So how can you make these two things come together? And that's really what our event in the House of Commons was about.
Graham Duxbury:That's that's what the campaign that we're trying to push forward is all about. It's trying to make those links between kind of social improvement, economic prospects and environmental sustainability.
Kevin Hegarty:And in particular there's a let's say the youth market here, the young people of this country in The UK, there is considerable number of people, talk to me about that, there's considerable number of people of a young age who aren't currently in education, employment or training, and yet we've also got this at exactly the same time, we've got this growth in opportunity that comes with developing this greener economy, so how do we put those two together? How does that how do we make that happen so that we can make sure that we're upskilling that generation that's coming through?
Graham Duxbury:Yeah. That's absolutely right. And the numbers, as I mentioned, are ticking up towards a million young people who are not earning or learning, to use that phrase. Quite a lot of them not actually engaging with the system either. So you've got quite a cohort within there who are just off registers, off radars.
Graham Duxbury:No one really knows what they're doing. And then you've got the group that are engaging with job centers and looking for work, and they're within that system. You're right. We're doing this at a time when we see report after report from business leaders and employers saying we've a massive skills gap, especially around the green economy. We've not got enough people to plant trees and fit heat pumps and fit solar panels and all that kind of stuff.
Graham Duxbury:We're crying out for skills. So you'd have thought, you know, that there's an easy kind of supply demand thing going on there, but it's not as easy as that. There are from what we can see, there there are perception issues and there are practical issues in the system. So the perception issues are that although lots of young people say they want a job with environmental purpose, they want to be doing something positive with their life and they see the environment as a positive way of expressing that, their level of understanding, their knowledge and awareness of how to get into environmental roles, how to get into what you might call the green economy is really low. There's also a perception that it's either people in white coats in laboratories inventing complex new fuel cell technologies or people in hard hats fitting windmills in the middle of the North Sea, or it's about digging ditches for low pay and low prospects.
Graham Duxbury:So there's all these perception issues that young people have that are not real. We know there are great jobs with purpose, great jobs with prospects in the environmental sector, but that's not as visible as it could and it should be for young people who are leaving school, especially those young people who may not be progressing down a more academic university route, which an increasing number of young people aren't. So you've got that kind of perception gap going on, but you've also then got some practical barriers in the system, not the least of which is that jobs in this sector are are being reinvented as we speak. All these jobs are evolving, and and we're getting new types of roles in new kinds of businesses. And how many 16 year olds leaving school know exactly which apprenticeship framework they wanna go down, exactly which career path they wanna start on.
Graham Duxbury:So we need a bit more flexibility in that system. We need employers coming together thinking about what are the foundational skills, what are the core competencies that might lead to a job in the kind of land management industry or the power sector or the construction industry. What are those basic skills, getting your CSCS card or learning how to operate safely outdoors or your understanding of things like water efficiency and energy efficiency, those basic building blocks that will equip young people for a range of bowls in a number of different sectors. So those are the barriers that we need to start working away at.
Kevin Hegarty:Absolutely. And one of the reasons that you and I were introduced relates to the charitable arm of what Cadence does. The company that I work for Cadence, we have a foundation called the Cadence Foundation which supports a lot of the work that Groundwork does and not least in relation to what we have coined the Green Doctors Academy. I find that interesting just for you to explain what the Green Doctors Academy is and how that is helping people retrain in many cases into a new role that is their first or perhaps not necessarily their first, but certainly a new role within the green economy sector. Explain to me about the Green Doctors Academy and what green doctors do.
Graham Duxbury:I would love to. Yes. And first off, the Cairman Foundation has been a hugely supportive partner of ours in the development of this service. So the green doctor work that we do, we've coined this phrase a few years ago, green doctors. They are effectively people that go into your home and advise you on how to reduce your energy bills, how to keep warm, but whilst in the home can also do lots of other stuff.
Graham Duxbury:They can fit some practical measures. They can change your light bulbs. They can fit radiator panels, but they can also advise you on where to go for forms of support. Are you on the energy company's priority register? Is your gas boiler decrepit and needs replacing?
Graham Duxbury:Have you got damp mold condensation in your home that needs dealing with by your landlord? And sometimes it's just about having a chat. You know. We walk into homes and find some people in very vulnerable circumstances who may not have seen anybody for weeks on end, if not months sometimes. So just being that kind of friendly person who can talk you through how to make the most of the energy that you can afford is a really important function, and the Cadent Foundation support has helped us really grow that.
Graham Duxbury:You won't be surprised to learn. Demand for that service has gone through the roof in the last five years with the increase in energy costs. So the more we've been able to do that, the better. But then one of the limits of growth to that for us was actually finding people that can do the work. So finding people that could come in because this is not about having some kind of highly technical skilled person in the energy industry.
Graham Duxbury:This is effectively someone who knows how to relate to people in vulnerable circumstances. This is almost a community worker job who can then be trained with energy efficiency advice, and finding people with those competencies, those skills, and the outlook has been really important for us. So with the help of the Keating Foundation, we've been able to put in place this kind of academy model where we can bring people in who may not have been working before, who may want to change their career, who may have been struggling with other vocational routes. And if they've got those core competencies of being able to deal with people empathetic and be supportive and be reliable and be trustworthy, then we've supported them to gain the qualifications around energy efficiency support and advice. And some are even moving on into other forms of activity into in terms of domestic retrofit work and so on and so forth.
Graham Duxbury:So that academy model has been really helpful for us, but it's also one of those examples where you can demonstrate that young people who are currently out of work not only wanna see a job with prospects, but they also benefit from having a job with purpose. So you can see the difference it makes to someone who may not have been working for a while, may even be slightly cynical about the world of work, who are given this opportunity. Not much classroom chalk and talk stuff because that might not be up their street, But the practical on the job working alongside one of our experienced green doctors going into the homes of people that they could relate to. This may be someone like their granny or their neighbor down the street who's really struggling to get by without the horrible decision making about what to spend your money on because your energy costs are too high. And just the job satisfaction that people can get from that can be transformative.
Graham Duxbury:It can really make people stick and think, okay. Yeah. This is something I wanna do. And then we can open up a career path because this is a growing sector. The energy advice market, the retrofit market is a growing sector, and there are jobs there to be had.
Graham Duxbury:So the more we can work with people to to demonstrate that that that kind of progression is possible and the support foundation has allowed us to get people in at the start of that journey, and set them off on that path, which has been phenomenal to see.
Kevin Hegarty:It is, it's a program I absolutely love, and I've met a couple of the Green doctors, and some of their backgrounds are absolutely fascinating, and I love the people's stories, that's always my bread and butter and what I love to see, and I remember meeting one of the Green Doctors in Merseyside who was a former professional footballer, having played for some teams that people may know, including Everton and Wigan Athletic, and now has gone on a career path that's taken him to become one of your green doctors, which I think is just stunning and amazing, and it's lovely to hear, but it makes me think that, so these jobs with purpose absolutely I think it's such an important thing now in the job market that a generation is coming through, and people who are looking to rethinking perhaps what they're currently doing now and looking for a career change. The sense of purpose is such a big point, isn't it? And I wonder then how if, let's say I was operating a small, medium, large sized business, what is it I need to do, and what does Groundwork think the business community needs to do and can do to support the growth of this kind of opportunity?
Graham Duxbury:There are huge opportunities here, think, and it should be within most businesses list of priorities to do this because as we said at the outset, many businesses are facing skill shortages. Many businesses are facing capacity gaps. So the more we can link these two aspects together, so we do have people who need to be given that leg up, need to be given that opportunity, need to be shown there is a career path, and we do have employers crying out for new talent, new skills. Many of the sectors that we work in have an aging workforce, so how do you refresh that with kind of new young talent coming through the system is really important. And but we need to remember employees operate at different scales, and there are different things that different kinds of businesses can do depending on where they are in the ecosystem.
Graham Duxbury:So some of the big employers can really engage with organizations like ours to invest in the front end of that process. So a really good example for me is we've been working a little bit with Balfour Beatty, who have been funding through their social value and CSR type budgets some work placements. So these are placements where people can get work experience. Actually working on one of our big community gardens. It's a place called the Green Patch in Kettering where people come and volunteer, and we grow food, and there's all sorts of educational activities going on, community activities going on.
Graham Duxbury:And there's always work to be done about managing that site, improving that site, building polytunnels, building little kind of toilet blocks, and all that kind of stuff. So these work placements supported by Balfour Beatty have enabled us to enhance and enrich that site. But the quid pro quo then is that those young people get a kind of paid placement working with Balfour Beatty and their supply chain within one of their local PFI contracts. I think it was a street lighting contract that some of them moved on to. So that ability, basically, for a business to go and use its charitable investment to support a charitable activity, but then use that as a feeder and as a conveyor belt to effectively try before they buy with new employees is a really great model.
Graham Duxbury:We've done similar schemes in Manchester supported by a company called Impacts, where we've been able to take good example I remember is a young chap called Jensen, who is a care experienced care leaver, wanted to be a plumber, but we've now found him a route into the retrofit market as an assistant retrofit installer, and he's thriving there with one of the businesses that's doing lots of retrofit work across South Manchester. And then Danny London Grosvenor, the property developer, doing exactly the same thing with us, a kind of routes to retrofit initiative. So they've got huge numbers of properties and quite a lot of big old historic buildings to retrofit, and they've been supporting their supply chain again to engage with us in order to provide opportunities for young people coming through our system who might want to get that kind of on the ground trade specific experience of how you retrofit domestic property or a public building. So there's lots of ways in which businesses can think about their recruitment mechanisms and open up that funnel, if you like, to bring people through the system. But then if you're working on a different scale, so if you're not one of those kind of big contractor organizations, one of the things we're doing a lot of is helping businesses come together almost as a coalition or a consortium.
Graham Duxbury:So a good example of that is our green space skills hub in London, which we're doing for the mayor and in conjunction with an organisation called Parks for London, which is about bringing employees in that land management sector, so housing associations or grounds maintenance companies, together so that they can make their vacancies more visible, but at the same time working with young people who may be thinking about roles in that sector to equip them with the core basic skills and effectively doing this matchmaking job in the middle. So, yeah, as an employee, you can you can think about your own recruitment channels, but you can also think about how you work with other businesses in these sorts of coalitions in order to open the door to a wider group of young people that may be looking for work.
Kevin Hegarty:That networking opportunity as well, isn't it, amongst the businesses to be able to share learnings and share experience must be absolutely fascinating, and what the advice here really is, if you're a business and you want to be more involved in this sector, go check out the Groundwork UK website and get in touch isn't it, because we need these businesses to come together and work together for their greater good, as well as their own individual business, and everyone reaps the rewards as a result of that, and I think from absolute practical perspective, one of the things I hadn't quite realized that Groundwork does is actually has a division within the federation that is called the Sustainable Businesses Services offer, which is helping organisations, isn't it? It's helping businesses who want to be doing better in this space, want to get a start in this space, and want to grow in this space, but perhaps need that little bit of support along the way, and you're there to provide that helping hand, aren't you, through that service? Talk me through that, please.
Graham Duxbury:It has been part of our mission since very early on, actually. So supporting organizations as well as individuals to make these connections between cost and sustainability. So we all know businesses can and need to reduce their costs in terms of energy use and raw material use. And if you can do that by reducing waste, that's a really positive thing. If you can go down the kind of resource efficiency route, that can generate huge savings.
Graham Duxbury:But also as regulation increases, businesses need to be avoiding fines, and they need to be working within the kind of frameworks and the regulations set by government or set as part of the supply chains that they're part of. And the thing we found over many years is that if you're an SME or a micro business working within that system, the ability and the capacity to do something about this is it's it can be really stretching. This is not easy stuff to get your head around. It's not easy stuff to do. If you're a if you're a big business, you'll have your own sustainability division, and you'll have people that are crawling all over your processes to do all of this.
Graham Duxbury:But if you're an SME trying to figure this out, trying to figure out how you recruit apprentices, how you demonstrate community investment, how you reduce your carbon footprint, how you work within increasingly stringent regulations, the support that's needed in the system there. And we've, as I embedded that within our charitable mission since day one. We have developed a kind of a more commercial offering around that, so businesses can pay for our support to to have experts come in and support you to do that process. But quite often, we've done this in conjunction with bits of the public sector as part of kind of regional growth schemes. So there was one in Cheshire that I remember called Race to Zero, where we were working with SMEs in that space funded through the local authorities to try and improve business competitiveness through sustainability.
Graham Duxbury:We're responsible for something called the carbon charter in Suffolk, which again is sponsored and supported by local government in that area. Again, as a way of supporting enterprise and supporting growth and development and clean growth of businesses in that area. So the kind of work that goes on is helping organizations implement an environmental management system or think about their carbon footprinting and reducing their carbon emissions. But equally, there's quite a bit of stuff about engaging your staff and your customers in that process because all of this is really predicated on behavior change inside a business. So that staff engagement piece is really important as is demonstrating to your local community that you want to be a responsible business in the midst of that community, and you want to be doing the right thing by everybody else in that area.
Graham Duxbury:So, yeah, there's there's a huge range of stuff that that businesses can do working together sometimes as part of that kind of environmental improvement planning.
Kevin Hegarty:I think it's such important advice isn't it, I think you've hit the nail on the head really that working together. I can imagine in some cases small businesses might be thinking oh Christ what can I do, what do I, how do I get myself out of this space? And sometimes it's the simple advice of you might need some help to figure that out, and the help is there, and it might be from fellow businesses, it might be from an organization like yourselves, and I think again that advice to go check out the Groundwork UK website is such an important thing to do because there are some resources and opportunities on there for people to pick up. Cramer, wanted to thank you so much for giving us your time to talk to us on the podcast. There's lots of things that you've mentioned there which I think will be of huge value to the listener.
Kevin Hegarty:One little plug for me is I had a little read of, I would encourage people to go Google Westminster wheels, I thought they were a wonderful case study of an organization you've worked with that have done a fabulous piece of work, so please go check that out if you're listening and looking for a really good example of how an organization has managed to grasp this and take the opportunity. So Graham, once again, you for joining us on the podcast. It's been lovely to have you with us.
Graham Duxbury:It's been an absolute pleasure. Thanks for inviting me.
Kevin Hegarty:Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this episode of Sustainability Insiders, please give the show a follow and a review in your podcast app. If you'd like to be a guest on a future episode, send an email to media.relations@CadentGas.com. Speak to you again soon.