I was very excited to receive the latest Photo You magazine in the post this morning. Howtomakeadifference.net is featured on three double pages, with lots of lovely images!

It may seem to have gone a bit quiet over here at “How to Make a Difference” but I have good reason. This summer I gave birth to our third child and we moved the whole family to Oxford, both pretty time consuming projects. Things are starting to settle down and I’m on the look out for more people in the Oxfordshire area to feature on the site. I also have plans for a How to Make a Difference “pop-up” shop in Oxford. So, watch this space. In the meantime, don’t forget there are plenty of amazing stories in the How to Make a Difference archives if you can’t wait for some new ones.

As you can see from the picture, I’ve been enjoying the perks of living outside London by swimming in the Thames (yes it’s very cold, about 4 deg C last time I went, incredibly invigorating…). Thank you to Tony Steele who happened to be passing one morning with his camera when I was swimming off Port Meadow.

“Sometimes shit just happens! Some health problems are unavoidable, but what really gets my goat is the avoidable ill health and anxiety and I wanted to set up a charity that would try and prevent that.” This is how Alison Baum describes the emotions that brought her, a mother of two children born with significant health issues, to set up a charity that aims to address childhood health inequalities in the UK.

Alison knows first hand, what it is like to not have the healthy child you expect. Her first son David was born with a cleft palate and Pierre Robin Sequence. Then, lightening struck twice when her second son Joshua was also born with a cleft palate and developed viral meningitis at 8 days old. Alison was determined not to let this prevent her breastfeeding and through a combination of tireless expressing and special feeding bottles she gave both her children the best possible nutritional start she could.

During this time, Alison came across the bra which she says changed her life – the Easy Expression Halterneck Bra. A friend told her she could buy it from the US, and it allowed her to hold or feed her son, or read a book at the same time as expressing milk. She set up a company called “Express Yourself Mums” in order to distribute the bra to other women in situations like her own. It was through talking to these mums that Alison started to realise some of the health inequalities that emerge from the earliest stages for children in the UK.

Alison, was a science graduate, working as a film maker at the BBC. After having her first son David, she went back to work and ran Express Yourself Mums in her spare time. She also trained to do peer support for breastfeeding and became a breastfeeding counselor. She was shocked to discover that “In spite of the fact that its benefits to babies and mothers are undisputed, you are much less likely to start or continue breastfeeding if you are from a lower socio-economic group or are young.”

After the birth of Joshua, and spurred on by lots of evidence that improving child health can also lead to better social outcomes, Alison set up Best Beginnings in 2006. “We started with breastfeeding because it’s such an effective public health intervention. But breastfeeding is just part of the bigger picture around child health. For example, it’s simply not acceptable that a baby born in Birmingham is 6 times more likely to die in infancy than a child born in Hampshire.” Alison realised she could use her media and networking experience to campaign across a range of health issues: to encourage breastfeeding, empower parents of premature babies, support new fathers and generally shake up the services provided to new parents for the better.

I met Alison in a café close to the office of Best Beginnings. She arrived directly from accompanying her two sons to the dentist, somewhat harassed and late, in a manner that I suspect is not uncommon for someone who has both been given, and taken on, some impressive challenges. Alison told me that when she first started Best Beginnings, she did something which would be worthwhile in many fields. She brought together 40 organisations, all of whom were trying to promote breastfeeding and got them to work together to produce the Breastfeeding Manifesto. By getting these groups to speak the same languages (“A task not for the faint hearted” Alison points out) she made them a much more powerful lobby. As a result of this coalition, the right to breastfeed in public has now been enshrined in UK law.

It’s this kind of practical, results focused approach which has allowed Alison to become welcomed and respected in the world of child health even as a relatively new kid on the block. “Prevention isn’t as sexy as cure, but it’s more effective. When you go to a conference and midwives come and give you a hug, as has happened to me, and thank you for what you’re doing, it’s wonderful.”

After raising enough funds, she used her film-making experience to put together the Bump to Breastfeeding DVD. The DVD was given to every pregnant woman in the UK from autumn 2008 to November 2010. It aims to provide women with the most up-to-date facts about breastfeeding, and shows a wide-variety of women making breastfeeding work for them. “Women are bombarded with inappropriate marketing in this area. I don’t want to pressurize people, just to create an enabling environment for them to be successful. 9 out of 10 women stop breastfeeding before they want to because of pain or insufficient milk, both of which are avoidable with the right support.” Independent evaluation by university researchers has shown that the DVD does increase breastfeeding rates, especially if given to an expectant mother with a recommendation from a midwife. The DVD is still available, but now that the benefits are proven, Best Beginnings is encouraging NHS trusts to purchase it themselves.

The next big challenge is the Small Wonders project. This aims to help parents with premature babies. Fundraising is still in progress for another DVD which will provide parents with a gold standard resource. “Small Wonders is about enabling parents to play a key role in the care of their premature baby: Giving them the confidence to ask questions, giving them the knowledge and support and the confidence to establish milk supply. All of which can lead to positive health outcomes.” Best Beginnings are recruiting champions in all neo natal units and have gained funding to pay for specialist nurses in two hospitals. The aim is to “prove that the intervention can reduce hospital stay, infection (which breastfeeding can) and readmissions to hospital and therefore to demonstrate that this can be a cost saving measure. We hope that the evidence we create will encourage all units to recruit specialist nurses to support this work.”

“It’s about never taking your foot off the pedal. These are real, very deep issues, but they’re not insurmountable. I have a stubborn streak in me. I’ve always had the need to do something and have a social impact.” Alison is certainly right that these are incredibly difficult issues to resolve but her approach of engaging widely with stakeholders, using the power of narrative films and encouraging external assessment of the impact of their work seems like it has as good a chance as any of success. Good luck to the team with this incredibly worthwhile cause.

Donate to Small Wonders.

It’s a world that former barrister Polly Higgins is toiling to achieve. About eight years ago, Polly found herself questioning the value of her legal career. She was in the middle of an employment case, and looked out the window and thought: “What the f*** am I doing?” She was defending a client who had gone beyond the point where she thought they should settle, in a case that had dragged on for three years. Polly had a revelation: “I care about what’s out there. I care about the planet. I don’t care about this anymore. I’m fighting unworthy causes.”

So Polly quit the Bar and took a far less lucrative option. She is now developing and promoting the legal instruments she believes are necessary to protect the environment: “I realised that if I were to take on the planet as my client, I didn’t have the tools of my trade,” Polly told me one damp morning in the basement kitchen of her Islington home. “We are predominantly governed by laws of property and ownership, which leads to use and abuse without consequence”.

She has now written a book “Eradicating Ecocide” and regularly promotes her alternative vision through public speaking: “We need to recognise nature’s rights and the planet’s rights and put in place crimes which will uphold those rights.” Reflecting on the personal implications Polly says: “I do not make anything near what I made when I was practicing, but you never know!”

Polly thanks her father for the inspiration to engage with the environment in this way. “He was a meteorologist during World War II. He had the most unusual capacity to analyse weather patterns. He instinctively knew what was coming next, with a very sound knowledge of first principles. I feel the same way about how Ecocide could work as a crime. I have an instinct that it’s going to happen, but could not have done it without my legal training.”

A chance phone call from the UN in 2008, asking Polly to speak about women and the environment, gave her the perfect platform to really develop and start promoting her ideas. “I said ‘Go and ask the highest person that you can about whether I can talk about a Universal Declaration of Planetary Rights instead?’ and they came back very fast and said ‘Forget about the first conference, come to one in 5 months time about climate change’.” That gave Polly the time to really put her thoughts together. “I just treated it like a legal brief and by the time I spoke at that conference, I really had an idea of what needed doing.”

Polly based her concepts on the example of Raphael Lemkin who proposed the introduction of the law of Genocide after World War II. In the wake of the Holocaust, the world was more than ready to accept a law that would address the intent to kill off an entire sector of people. “Civilisation gets to a certain point where it has sufficient knowledge, that it has to close the door. At the moment we have vast damage and destruction to the planet, but there’s no way to address it.”

Polly believes that if individuals within companies and governments are made responsible for environmental crimes, we will immediately see a change in behaviour. In response to pressures to invest in environmentally damaging projects, company directors would refuse on the basis that they could go to prison for it. “It’s about putting something in place that shifts what’s acceptable. Like when William Wilberforce created laws that shut off slavery. There was no point in saying ‘use your slave a little less’. That’s like energy efficiency. Wilberforce knew you needed laws to stop slavery completely. Literally over night it changed from being de rigueur to utterly unacceptable to have black people in chains.”

At the UN Conference in 2008, Polly proposed a Universal Declaration of Planetary Rights. By September 2009, the government of Bolivia said that they were interested in proposing a similar Universal Declaration of Mother Earth Rights into the General Assembly at the UN. They have now done this.

The next piece in the puzzle, Polly decided, was a new language around environmental destruction. She came across the term “Ecocide” and decided it was exactly what was needed to express the crimes against the planet which she is so eager to stop. Polly proposed that the crime of Ecocide be added to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court alongside genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and the crime of aggression. She submitted a paper on the subject to the UN Law Commission in April 2010. In order for the crime to come into force, two thirds of the UN member states will need to agree.

There’s still a long way to go before Polly’s ideas are implemented, but her determination is unwavering: “I believe we are living at a very crucial time in history when we can do something and make something happen. I believe that we can do this. I also believe that we have a moral duty to do so.” I just hope we don’t need the equivalent of an environmental holocaust this time, to spur the relevant authorities into action.

Creative disruption is Reed Paget’s aim. He believes that by setting up very environmentally conscious businesses, and proving that they can succeed in the market place, he can influence the behaviour of business as a whole.

His first attempt has been to transform the bottled water industry with the brand Belu. 8 years ago, Belu was just an idea for the documentary film maker Reed, who had come to the UK from the US to run an on-line news channel. The dot-com bubble burst and the channel lost its funding. Reed, who had always been passionate about the environment, decided that ten years in the media was enough for him and it was time to do something more practical. “I thought instead of talking about the problems of the world, why not get involved in business? I saw business as the main culprit and thought maybe I could do more there.”

Reed chose the bottled water industry, in spite of its overall reputation of being unsustainable, because “in a world where many countries don’t have good water, or people don’t trust the water they’re being given, people will continue to consume bottled water.”

Belu distinguishes itself from other bottled water companies in several ways. They are always striving for environmental best practice and low carbon emissions. They are also a not-for-profit organisation which donates any surpluses to clean water projects.

I met Reed on the South Bank of the River Thames, near to one of Belu’s most recent philanthropic projects. They have funded a Passive Debris Collector to sift some of the tons of rubbish that get thrown in the Thames every day. The ability to fund such projects has been “The biggest success and the biggest mistake of Belu”, Reed told me. “It was the best decision because it told our customers that we were in this together, and trying to do something good. The downside is that it has been almost impossible to raise growth capital.” Investors don’t want to risk their capital unless they can see a potentially, significant upside if things go well. This has meant that Reed has only ever been able to get access to small loans. “During 6 years of trading, we have done 35 rounds of funding from 14 different funders. Had I made Belu a for-profit, green business, I could have raised the money in 1 or 2 rounds.”

However, other aspects of Belu have worked very well. Initially, Reed scoured Google for green investors. Eventually, he came across Hal Taussig, an investor from the US, who had previously set up a green travel agency and was interested in the concept of Belu. Hal provided enough money for Reed to complete a product design which in turn enabled him to get a contract with the UK supermarket Waitrose to sell Belu Water. “We had never manufactured at that point. We didn’t even have the money to manufacture. We didn’t tell Waitrose that! But they liked the idea. Good for them!” Once Reed had one contract they were able to find other funders who would give them long-term loans to manufacture. “Then we started selling. First with a glass product line, then plastic, then we went carbon neutral. It was very hard though.”

I am so impressed that Reed was able to turn his hand so easily to starting a business. “Having worked in documentary film, I had to learn how to be entrepreneurial and to manage projects. But, I had no idea what a profit and loss statement was, or cash flow or the difference between branding and marketing. I didn’t own a single button-up shirt! What I realised is these things are learnable.”

Within weeks of starting Belu, Reed was talking to the Rocky Mountain Institute in the US about biopolymers: plastics made from an infinitely renewable resource, plants. After a three year research and development project, Belu introduced its first corn plastic bottles in 2006. It’s still early days with these, but according to Reed, if they become more widely adopted, their lifecycle is 50% less carbon intensive than traditional plastics. Neither does Belu use PVC liners in any of its caps. A common practice which apparently has uncertain health consequences for consumers. What carbon emissions they are unable to save through energy efficiency in production and distribution, Belu offsets. Belu is made in the UK, using UK raw materials (if available) and is not exported. I wonder how Belu can compete on price with all these extra costs. “Every company has a profit margin, but because we are a not-for-profit company we can take out of our profit the cost to be green. Nevertheless, we haven’t been the cheapest in the market.” Reed is convinced that scale will help with this.

Now Belu is growing fast: “We’re at 2.5 million pounds turnover. We’ve recapitalised. We’ve hired a new managing director who has more commercial experience.” But for Reed the aim is not just market dominance: “The goal is not Belu. Belu is a tool that achieves a bigger goal. We’ve planted a seed and now others are trying to copy us. It’s going to create a change even if I don’t ultimately own the company that sells the product.” When Belu started business, there was very little environmental awareness in the drinks sector. Now, most of Belu’s competitors are doing something and Reed believes that the existence of Belu has helped to push them that way much faster.

So what’s next? Reed has set up a new company called One Earth Innovation. This company will endeavour to spawn more start-ups like Belu, in different sectors. “We’ll find out how to create the greenest brand, then we’ll bring it to market. Either we’ll win the market, this time with capital, or we’ll force our competitors to be green by disrupting the market.” He wouldn’t give me any clues as to what those new companies will be, although toasters did come up in the conversation quite a lot… Reed says he has learnt the hard way that it’s best not to go public until you know the timescale you can deliver on. People have criticised him in the past when things have been harder than expected, and taken a long time. “When I started Belu I was very naïve. Hopefully, the next venture will be more successful, without as many mistakes.” I think the chances of that are looking good.