Pro-bono professional services - is this the new carbon offseting?

Leapfrog believes so. It’s a new not-for-profit initiative, bringing together experts in the environmental industries to provide support and expertise for start-ups in the low carbon arena.

It began in 2006 as an idea. Travers Smith, a UK-headquartered law firm, has had an active environmental committee for some time, and the company has worked hard to reduce its emissions profile in the traditional ways – using renewable power, changing the lightbulbs etc. But at some point, as is usual, the firm came across the core emissions that it simply couldn’t affect. Instead of deciding to buy some carbon credits to offset those emissions, Steve McNab, head of environment at the firm, came up with the idea that the firm could contribute pro-bono work instead.

Three years later, the final result is an initiative which enables organisations to facilitate real change in the wider market, rather than simply buy their way out of a problem. What makes it so exciting is that the right kind of expertise and support can be impossible to attract when your business is small – Leapfrog can really help small projects to scale.

The initiative intends to support businesses in three key areas – low carbon and cleantech businesses; community projects; and carbon reduction and renewable projects in the developing world. It plans to provide expertise to developing projects which result in the cutting of more than 500,000 tonnes of CO2 a year. The hope is that in three years, the group will be able to support over 100 projects a year.

The group predicted that the first set of seven projects will receive around 4,000 hours of professional services worth approximately £1m and believes that there are many more to come. Andrew Neuman, founder of the Low Carbon Foundation, the world’s first not-for-profit venture capital fund (returns capped at 2%) freely admitted that without the help of the delivery team it was unlikely that the fund could have afforded to get off the ground.

Over 15 professional services firms have joined the network, including Travers Smith, as well as financial advisors such as BDO Stoy Hayward and investment consultancies such as Decarbonize, and it expects many more organisations to sign up. It’s all about leverage – if you know the right people, get the right help, you can move further, faster and in the right direction. Thecleantech/low carbon world is still relatively small and many gamechanging projects, from new technologies to encouraging behaviouralchange at a community level, simply don’t have the personnel or thefunds to accelerate what they do.

The Leapfrog team is setting up a skills bank to enable organisations to register their interest in helping. So if your organisation has skills in business & finance; legal; engineering & environmental; marketing and contacts, then go along and join the initiative. Obviously it’ll help if your organization already has a commitment to CSR and pro-bono work but if not, why not use this as an opportunity to put one in place.

And if you’ve got a project, a grand idea but no idea what to do next, then you should get in touch and see if you could be one of the next Leapfrog projects – http://www.carbonleapfrog.com.