Sport for Climate Action and Nature

Katie is Founder and CEO of Pledgeball - a research-backed charity that supports sports bodies to effectively engage fans on environmental sustainability.

Working with stakeholders across the sports community, from clubs to bodies such as the LTA, from the FSA to County FAs, Pledgeball mobilises fans and event-goers to make pro-environmental choices resulting in significant emission reductions.

Sara works as a Sustainability Advisor at UK Sport, to embed sustainability expertise and catalyse systemic change in operations and behaviours across organisations.

She has worked in sustainability at different levels from strategic planning to practical implementation, in the higher education, local government, museum and charity sectors.

At UK Sport she works across departments, leading on the organisation’s Environmental Sustainability Strategy. She loves connecting people and ideas to make positive change happen.

She is also the Climate Change Trustee for the Museums Association and a Scout leader.

In an article the Sunday Times newspaper, Professor Dominic Sandbrook of Oxford University, described David Goldblatt, as “not merely the best football historian writing today, he is possibly the best there has ever been.”

David currently teaches for the Football Business Academy in Geneva,  is a regular visiting Professor at Pitzer College, Los Angeles,  and is an Honorary Fellow of the International Centre for the Culture and History of Sport at De Monfort University, Leicester.

His journalism has appeared in the Guardian, the Observer, the Financial Times, the New York Times, Prospect, New Statesman, the Times Literary Supplement and many other publications. He has won the sports story of the year at the Foreign Press Association Media Awards in London three times:

• In 2009, for the BBC World Service documentary Mathare United. which showcased the  power of football for social development in the slums of urban Kenya;
• In 2015 for “The Prison Where Murderers who Play for Manchester United” published in The Guardian, which reported on the role of a DIY English Premier League and Prison football association in turning Luzira, Uganda’s notorious high security jail, into one of Africa’s most humane and progressive prisons; and
• In 2018 for “Viktor Orban’s Reckless Football Obsession”, published in The Guardian, which featured the first interview with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban with a foreign newspaper for more than a decade. It was shortlisted for the European Media Awards in 2019.

In 1992 he completed a Phd at the University of Cambridge Social Theory and the Environment, published as a book by Polity Press in 1996. In a great loop he has returned to these issues publishing,  in 2020, Playing Against the Clock: Global Sport and Climate Change, a synoptic review of the issue and a call to radically transform the sports industry.

He helped found, and is now chair of, Football For Future, campaigning for environmental sustainability in English football, and over the last two years has written, and spoken widely on sport and the climate crisis.