Todmorden Harriers have been implementing green initiatives over the past months and are constantly looking at ways they can make small positive changes. Here, club member Kim Ashworth shares some of the things the club has been doing.
At Todmorden Harriers & AC in West Yorkshire, we’ve had a club Environmental Policy for a few years now. Damian Hall’s book has been very influential in the club and we’re always looking for new things to lessen our impact.
Here are a few things that we’ve put in place recently; ideas have come from everywhere including The Green Runners, local initiatives and our members:
- Several of our club races now have had ‘Green travel raffles’ – where we collect data about how people travel to the race, and they get a ticket for the raffle if they’ve walked/run/cycled/public transport/car shared with 3+ people. For our most recent race we publicised this beforehand, including publishing train times and a Mean Girls meme…upon drawing the raffle, the most popular mode of transport seemed to be ‘walk’, as the event was popular with locals!
- Prizes at our recent 10k road race (Red Hot Toddy) were mostly vouchers for local businesses – so low plastic, mostly plant-based and supporting the local community
- We teamed up with local cargobike delivery service Cargodale who provided an e-bike for our lead vehicle – no grubby emissions for the runners, narrower than a car (for small country lanes) and a fun talking point! Cargodale did a post about it on Facebook.
- New cable ties for signage that we buy are reusable…although it does turn out we need to provide better training for our enthusiastic scissors-wielders!
- Availability of plant-based food at the venue was publicised and we had a good turnout of Vegan Runners
- We’re trialling a “Green Prix” this year alongside our standard club Grand Prix – again encouraging greener travel, supported by car-share WhatsApp groups
- The club donates to local tree planting social entrerprise Forus Tree Co-operative for the growing and planting of trees locally. This is an amount calculated to help offset the carbon generated by people travelling to Tod Harriers organised races.
- Once a month we now have a litter pick at our ‘pack runs’
- Once a month we now have kit swaps where old/unwanted kit is available to anyone rather than it just getting thrown away.
A fantastic effort from Todmorden Harriers, showing just how much people want to work together to make their running greener.
For more ideas on things you or your club can do to make positive green changes, check out our Toolkits section on our website.