Street League started in 2001, as a football tournament between 16 homeless hostels. At that time, Damian was an accident and emergency doctor at University College Hospital, London. He was troubled by the number of homeless people who came into the emergency department with multiple needs, and left again with little hope of being helped long-term.

As a young person himself, Damian had found sport to be a great refuge. “When I was 15, I had a fantastic rugby coach. I played six days a week and it had a very beneficial effect on my grades. I ended up going from the bottom to top of class.” So, when he saw NHS systems were not helping those in need, Damian thought he might be able to do something about it through the power of sport. “Whilst I was still on the wards, I dreamt up the idea of engaging people through a fun and healthy activity, working with lots of friends and contacts. So, I picked up a phone book with the hostels written in it and just rang around them all.” Damian organised six weeks of training leading up to a football tournament. Kit, equipment and transport were all laid-on to make participation as easy as possible. It was a huge success. “The homeless guys and their workers were saying: ‘This is fantastic! Great! We’ve never seen them so enthusiastic!’. We started to see some major breakthroughs with people.”

The next significant step forward was later in 2001 when Damian decided to take a year’s sabbatical. He was given some funding for Street League and the rest is history. “It’s the longest sabbatical ever!”, Damian now jokes. “It was an opportunity to go and do this, and so I just jumped. Once you’ve jumped, you figure out how to fly on the way down. That’s the only way to do things, otherwise nothing ever happens.”

While Damian loved being a doctor, he wanted more. “This is akin to me going into management and asking “How do you change the landscape?” It’s difficult to do that in a front-line job. I loved being a doctor. The people contact was fantastic. But I’ve always been an ideas person. I want to create and grow stuff. That’s where my ambition always lay.”

In its current incarnation Street League works with about 1000 people in London, Glasgow and the North East of England. They work in partnership with about 60 organisations. Players come from a range of disadvantaged backgrounds including homelessness, drug and alcohol abuse, displacement, unemployment, crime, learning difficulties and mental health. In addition to football, Street League runs self-defence and dance sessions, which also attract women to the project. About 20% of all participants are now female.

Once a player joins Street League, it’s more than just a game, as the organisation’s strap line goes. All individuals are encouraged to participate in a range of training from goal-setting to back-to-work skills and sports-based qualifications. Even those who want to choose a more “free flow” route, are still expected to reconsider their desire for employment at regular intervals. “We’re not here just for free football. If you’re interested in moving yourself onwards, that’s great, but we need to know what that destination is. It’s not time bound, and if you’re not ready yet we’ll check in again to find out if things have changed.” Once players do get a job, they can join Street League’s graduate league, which is run in the evenings and on weekends. “Sport then becomes recreational and an integral part of their success story. If you’re fit and well, you tend to have lots of other things going well in your life.”

Many of the players have been failed by the traditional systems of education, and not everyone is ready to be helped back into employment. “It can be very frustrating in this field of work, because you’re sometimes working with people who don’t want to achieve what you want them to achieve. But if they are ready, then we can fast track them through that process.”

And what about the future? Since I met Damian, Street League has already moved to bigger and better offices in Kennington, right next to the pitches of Kennington Park. Damian also sees huge opportunity for growth in football as a tool for development, both in the UK and internationally. He is on the board of Street Football World and through that sees how football is being used around the world by NGOs to help with issues as diverse as HIV awareness, women’s empowerment and conflict resolution.

Damian sums it up: “It’s fun. It’s healthy. It’s a bit of a no brainer to use sport as a social development tool. That’s perhaps it’s purest use in society.” I have a feeling he will have no shortage of volunteers to help him.

By day, Paul is a founding director of Priestmangoode, an internationally renowned design studio, which specialises in the interiors of airplanes, trains and cruise ships. But Paul and his wife Tess, have long since held another ambition: to plant trees. In 2005, they decided to look at a range of sites in Northumberland, where Tess’s family are from. Paul says they immediately fell in love with one piece of land: “They were asking much too much. We offered to buy half the land at the going rate and they took it and so we ended up with 200 acres! It’s about a mile square. It’s a whole hill with a derelict farm in the middle.”

The deal was completed in 2006 and all 60,000 trees had been planted on about 100 acres of the land before 2007. Paul’s years of experience in product design clearly helped to take this project from concept to completion so fast: “I’ve always loved projects. I like to do things and create things,” he told me.

Unfortunately, I was not able to meet Paul in the woodland itself, but I was able to see some photographs over coffee in his Notting Hill mews house. Paul and Tess visit their trees about three times a year, when they hire a camper van and go and park it on the site; a side benefit which Paul clearly takes great pleasure in: “It’s fascinating to see the trees growing. It’s got two footpaths through it, so people can enjoy it. It’s lovely to see people walking their dogs on it. And we have local school children coming to visit. We’ve met so many local people through the project.”

The Forestry Commission have been of great assistance. They provide up to 50% grants for this kind of project. Although Paul and Tess had to find all the money up front, the grant will be repayed to them over the next five years. Paul says they want to reinvest that money in more land and trees in the same area. They clearly have the woodland creating bug!

The Forestry Commission also advise on which trees to plant and who to get to plant them. “They assessed the land and then planted willows down by the river and other trees, like rowan and holly, higher up. It’s all native species. It can never be cut down.” Along with the Forestry Commission grant came an archeological assessment, which is why trees are only planted on 100 of the 200 acre site “The archeologists said there were some interesting earth works in certain places. You could plant all over it, but that would restrict the grant.” At a cost of £2 per tree planted, you can understand why the grant is worth taking.

Other than that minor setback, Paul sees no downsides. To him it’s a fun and interesting way to invest some money. He’s happy to talk about how the woodland is developing; what measures they have taken to manage the wildlife in a way that protects the young trees; and what he’s learnt about ecosystem management along the way.

“There’s not many things where you just pay your money knowing you’re not going to get anything in return. It’s not for financial gain. I’m not going to sell it on. It’s something that’s going to be there forever.”

Paul is pretty circumspect about the whole project. “I don’t really talk about it very much. It’s just one of those things that have gone on and I enjoy. I can’t quite believe that it’s sitting there now.” If Paul doesn’t want to talk about it, then I will have to. Wouldn’t it be great if woodlands rather than yachts and sports cars became the ultimate status symbol?

Last September, I was asked by the Media Trust, to travel to Cornwall to photograph Sally Grint, the Head of Development and Communications at ShelterBox. I was immediately capitivated by Sally as she spoke with such passion and conviction about the value of this charity’s work.

ShelterBox is usually one of the first aid agencies on the ground in emergency situations, like the one currently unfolding in Haiti. They use their military expertise – founder Tom Henderson is ex-military, as are many of their employees and volunteers – to transport survival boxes to the heart of disasters as quickly as possible. Each box has the equipment for a family of up to ten people to survive when they are left with nothing: A purpose designed tent, cooking equipment, water purification kit, bedding and other supplies depending on the nature of the situation. Each box costs £490 to fill and transport to where it is needed, with the support necessary to make sure the equipment is distributed and used to its utmost advantage.

Sally took me around the ShelterBox warehouse in Helston, where volunteers were packing the piles of equipment into hundreds of green boxes to ship to “holding” locations around the world. The boxes are dispatched in advance to sites near to disaster hot-spots, so that they can be deployed as rapidly as possible when needed. Thanks to the large amount of volunteer support that the charity receives, almost none of the £490 is spent on overheads; it’s almost all to pay for the equipment inside the box and for the transportation to where it is needed.

Trained ShelterBox response teams are mobilised to take the boxes into disaster situations. They travel with the boxes, and stay for 10 to 14 days to ensure that their contents are distributed effectively and used correctly. ShelterBox currently has 150 such trained volunteers around the world, divided between Europe, America and the Antipodes.

Sally herself is an amazing and deeply inspiring woman to meet. Within minutes of picking me up in the ShelterBox Landrover, she was sharing the very moving story of the last conversation she had with her husband, who had died five years previously. He was sick with depression and had asked her if there was any hope: “Hope for the future, hope at all in life, hope to be happy again?” After his death, Sally moved from London, with her two young children, to Helston so she could be near to family. Late one night, her husband’s words still ringing in her ears, she typed “hope” into Google and up popped an article titled “Hope in a Box”. The article was about ShelterBox and Sally was amazed to find that this “hope in a box” was actually located down the road from her in Helston. Having devoured all the information on their website, she turned up the next day to find out more.

Sally started work the following day as a volunteer. While in London, Sally had a very successful PR career, working with all the big labels of high fashion. She had become disillusioned with that world and saw in ShelterBox a way to use those skills to really make a positive difference in the world. She initially helped with fund-raising and trained as a response team volunteer. She was deployed to Bangladesh following Cyclone Sidr: “The journey of my role within ShelterBox begins with the families out there in Bangladesh who will still be recovering from their losses. One man who had lost his wife and eldest daughter held my hand and said ‘I prayed and someone cared’; a sentence that has stayed with me, putting the box into perspective. It is a tent, some tools, some vital equipment but it’s the getting it there that is so important. It’s the packaging up of so much effort from so many people. It’s an incredible box.”

Now Sally heads up ShelterBox’s communication department and has helped transform the organisation’s press relations, as it has grown in recent years from a small charity into a major aid industry player. This week, I am sure, she will be incredibly busy trying to tell stories which will bring in funds, so that they can get more of these life-saving boxes to those who need them in Haiti. Having seen their operations in practise, I know that money given to them will directly help those most in need at this time. Please think about donating something to their efforts if you can.

Now back to Sophie, who is the founder of the School of Life; A social enterprise which, in her words, aims to “take a self-help approach to the history of ideas and make them more relevant, alive and a lot more fun.” In practise, this means that she and her small team of colleagues run adult education courses from their funky looking shop in Bloomsbury. Courses with titles like “how to be a good friend”, “how to make love last” and “how to be alone” aim to explore a wide-range of literature and thought in a way that attracts the modern consumer.

The price tag is £30 for an evening discussion or £125 for more extensive weekend courses. Sophie says: “People are used to education being free, or very cheap, and we’re putting it out at cost price. So there’s the idea that we’re very expensive and only cater to a certain section of the population. Actually, our competitors are all government funded or heavily subsidised.” Sophie is adamant that she does not want to go down that path, with its endless form-filling and potential compromise of ideals. “It would be lovely to offer the courses much cheaper, but it’s quite a good test of whether people have got something out of it, if they are prepared to return as paying customers. It makes you more genuinely accountable.”

Sophie had been mulling over the idea of spicing up the world of adult education when she had “a stroke of luck”. A friend of hers suggested she pitched her idea to a group of funders who were looking for a culture project to invest in. She convinced them that the School of Life was a good place to put their money and quit her job at an East London arts centre in Summer 2007. For a year, Sophie was paid to develop the idea at home while pursuing an exhaustive search for suitable premises. After realising that she could get a lot more for her money if they located themselves in a shop, they chose their current premises on Marchmont Street. The ground floor is an appealing, if sparsely stocked, bookshop and downstairs, their seminar room is beautifully decorated with the illustrations of Charlotte Mann. Sophie muses that “it’s difficult to remember which came first, the idea of approaching education like retail, or finding ourselves in a shop”. Whichever way around things happened, the recipe has been one of success. The School of Life has attracted lots of media attention and has developed a powerful brand. When I met Sophie they were not in the black financially yet, but had plans to sell bespoke courses to blue chip companies as one way of getting there.

“The ideas we don’t have to pay for, so that’s an asset to our business plan!” Sophie laughs. The big challenge has been finding teachers who can deliver the material in a way that meets Sophie’s demanding requirements. “We want to be really quirky and humble but we want to deliver something completely extraordinary, that is intellectually up there with the best universities, that is up there with the most extraordinary personal development or drama experience you might have.” This has taken a lot of coaching and preparation on behalf of the School of Life team: “The amount of effort that we put into everything makes it utterly illogical.” But once the teachers are on board, Sophie says they are “very wedded to us”. Another asset to her business, I’m sure.

Sophie enjoys helping her contemporaries work out what to do with their lives: “Our audience is mainly our own age. They are thinking how can I make the most out of life? We’re here to say, ‘take the opportunity to come and work out your own thoughts. Even if you feel like you’re 45 and should have sorted them out by now.’”

What about the future? Sophie would like to see the School of Life replicated on high streets around the country. “We want to be like the Boots for ideas.” I suspect they could be a much cooler chain-store than that. Right now, I think Sophie is on maternity leave and so probably has other priorities, but watch this space for more engaging evening classes coming your way.

Thanks to John Little and the Grass Roof Company, the Clapton Park Housing Estate in East London, looks like no other. The borders are filled with wild flowers, red poppies drape onto the pavement and residents grow vegetables in former rose beds. Rather than rows of unchanging shrubs and acres of fenced, mowed grass, John has created gardens which encourage the wellbeing of residents and enable those who want to grow things, to do so. John tells me, many of the wildflowers are grown from seed: “We seed the whole estate for 250 quid”. The resulting plants need far less watering and have lowered the need for herbicides. It’s hard to understand why this isn’t happening on every estate in the country.

I met John in Venetia’s Coffee Shop, which is just up the road from Clapton Park. John explains how he has always appreciated plants: “When I was a teenager in Essex, I was very interested in wild plants. Which was a bit bizarre. Not many kids were into that. I loved planting in my grandfather’s garden and I did voluntary work with the Wildlife Trust.” However, for the first 20 years of his career John worked in the family shoe business. It was only when his father decided to retire, in 1998, that John thought he would also pursue another path: “I thought I’d have a go at gardening: Turfing and whatnot.”

John, and his brother Robert, started the Grass Roof company which concentrated on designing and building garden projects. As the name implies, one of their specialities is installing roofs that are covered in vegetation. John explains some of the many benefits: “Green roofs keep buildings cool in summer, they reduce the urban heat island affect and they encourage sustainable drainage, because they hold onto sixty percent of the rain that falls onto them.”

During the first couple of years of operating in Essex, John enjoyed experimenting with different habitats and materials. They worked for some schools and found them very open to using wild plants and even, after some pursuasion, green roofs. The next big thing was when the Clapton Park Estate asked if the Grass Roof Company would do some work for them: “We dug up a load of concrete either side of the road, put in some beds and some art works. Just to make it look different from a council estate. We experimented with using different planting – not shrubs that have no seasonality.”

Not everyone was immediately convinced by the more “organic” looking estate: “The first year we had to put signs up. It just looked like we’d left the weeds to grow everywhere.” John also had to win the contract for herbicide control on the estate to prevent their flowers being sprayed with weed killer. He says he still struggles sometimes to convince the contract manager about what they are doing: “Our guys know what a poppy looks like and so they don’t spray the plants that look interesting. It does sometimes look like we ain’t done bugger all, but when there are poppies coming up through the cracks, it gives a really nice feel to the place.”

Some residents were particularly enthusiastic about the opportunity to grow food. Like Zanep, a female resident who used to spend all her time indoors. There were already allotments on the estate but the waiting list is about five years long: “We saw pieces of land with fences around them that no-one goes in to. So, we’ve been nicking pieces of suitable ground and giving them to people to make food. It just made sense really.” Now Zanep has a nice big plot where she grows food and she even bakes bread outside for her friends. “It’s concrete stories like that which really make you feel like you’re making a difference. That’s the kind of thing I like to hang on to.”

In 2007 John and his brother won a silver gilt at the Chelsea Flower Show with a Clapton Park Estate garden. They took some of the residents to this quintessentially English event. “They enjoyed that because people were interested in where they lived. It’s an incredibly white middle class event and our people were the only black people in the show.”

John wishes that other councils would copy some of the ideas from the Clapton Park Estate. “What’s tricky is organising things so that it’s easy for a big team to do. To roll it out we’d need some kind of formula that works, but you need to be flexible. They’re flowers at the end of the day. Sometimes the seeds grow, sometimes they don’t. Because most of the contracts are council run, they’re not so inclined to experiment.” Turning over land to allotments seems to be an easier model for other estates to follow: “There are often spaces that have been mowed for years, with a fence around them, that no-one has ever stood on. If councils realised they could be maintained more cheaply by turning them over to food growing, then they might be interested. If you add up the green space on social housing there’s a massive amount that could be used better.”

It’s hard to see the downside of what John is doing: Helping some of the people who need it most to get back in touch with nature and the seasons. When I met him he was just back from telling his story at a conference in Glasgow: “I go to these conferences and it makes me wonder, why am I the only person who has managed to deliver this on a housing estate?” I leave John with the same view. Why is it so hard to make this happen? As John puts it “it’s so ridiculously simple, I can’t understand why it’s not mainstream.”