The Decade of Doing & a brief history of Justdiggit

While the world is watching, ignoring and or participating in the COP 26 in Glasgow, and as times have never been more urgent when it comes to fixing the climate crisis, I felt the need to write a piece on the history of Justdiggit. It shows us that when you leverage each other's strengths, you find solutions carried by a positive movement. Building the momentum to tackle this crisis. During the decade journey Justdiggit and all the people that have worked, supported or are still working there have learned a lot by doing, failing, adjusting but mostly listening. We feel ready to make the coming ten years the decade of doing.

Justdiggit is a Dutch NGO founded in 2010 by (ao) Dennis Karpes and Peter Westerveld, based in Amsterdam and Nairobi and working on ecosystem restoration in Africa for over 10 years. We would not be where we are today without Peter Westerveld, our co-founder, who unfortunately has passed away some years ago. Peter started by restoring ecosystems in Kenya using bulldozers to dig trenches that retain rainwater. This approach was very successful from an ecological point of view but wasn't locally / community owned and therefore felt a bit top down.

Since the passing of Peter we had to rebuild the Justdiggit organisation and were lucky to encounter people like our CTO Sander de Haas who helped introduce a community based approach to ecosystem restoration. Since then we started working with amazing partners such as Maasai Wilderness Conservation Trust, Amboseli Ecosystem Trust and African Conservation Centre. These partnerships allowed us to work grassroots with and alongside the local communities who live on and benefit from the restored land.

Together we introduced the Earth Smiles aka water bunds which are rainwater harvesting interventions that created the same or even better ecological impact but are completely ran by the local Maasai communities, providing them with an income and ownership. A very important turn of events looking back. The Earth smiles allow for rainwater to infiltrate into the soil, thereby replenishing the aquifer and regreening large plots of land.

Since then the Justdiggit approach has always been to only work through and with local community based partners that "own" the regreening. Since 2014 these communities in Kenya have dug over 180,000 of these Earth smiles restoring enormous plots of previously considered lost lands.

Once the community based approach rooted within our organisation we started working in Tanzania with the amazing LEAD foundation, founded by Bishop Simon Chiwanga and ran by his son Njamasi and his incredible team. They were already working on FMNR, farmer managed natural restoration. This is a technique that improves the lives of small hold or subsistence farmers by combining trees with crops, resulting in better soil quality, improved water retention, more shade and most importantly more crop yields and thus improved livelihoods for the farmers and their families.

Together we came up with a communication approach that would increase the uptake of these techniques considerably. In the last 4 years we have been able to restore over 6 million trees together with LEAD foundation, restoring over 60,000 hectares of degraded soil in Tanzania.

Justdiggit co-founder Dennis Karpes, our MD Marjolein Albers and myself were also behind the Dance4life project, where we have learned that positive and solution driven communication for social topics is a crucial and powerful approach. So from day 1 at Justdiggit we started working in the Netherlands with partners such as Stroom, Lemz, Kinetic, BlowUp, Jean Mineur, Talpa, Brand Deli, IMA, Timm & Pimm, RTL and many others to promote our positive climate solutions, all completely sponsored by these partners. We were fortunate to have amazing ambassadors such as our patron Desmond Tutu, Floortje Dessing, André Kuipers, Amara Onwuka, Tess Milne and many others who embraced and gave credibility to our cause.

Since 2013 we have built this positive movement by using a strong communication approach. When (Havas) Lemz founders Peter and Mark, who ran our creative agency and family decided they wanted to make more international impact and therefore sold their agency to Havas ( a global network) things really started happening for Justdiggit; all of a sudden we had friends in many new countries across the world. We were able to start in Germany with Eric Schoeffler, Christina Graef-Schleputz, Sven Traichel, Thomas Funk and their amazing teams in Dusseldorf and Frankfurt who run Justdiggit in Germany without ever being paid for their creative and media efforts.

Thanks to them, Thomas D, the frontman of Die Fantastischen 4 became our German ambassador and partners such as Der Spiegel, RTL, Seven One media and many more helped bring our story to the German public completely sponsored. And we were connected to Vineel Agarwal, managing partner of Havas Africa and her team who have helped us in many African countries in setting up completely sponsored campaigns in ao Tanzania, Kenya, South Africa and Ivory Coast and Uganda.

Through our long time partner Kinetic and especially Dennis Kuperus, we were introduced to Stuart Taylor, former Kinetic UK exec who took it on to start Justdiggit in the UK, since then we have been able to promote Justdiggit in the UK through sponsored Out Of Home billboards with JCDecaux, Alight Media, Ocean Outdoor, BlowUp media and many others.

A few months later PR specialist Rebecca Blinston-Jones also joined the team and together they have formed sponsored partnerships with DCM for over 3000 cinema screens in the UK to broadcast our manifesto film and with two major PR agencies Woodrow and Harvard PR who will help bring our story to the world.

Through working with these communication partners came the realisation that communication was not only crucial in Europe to raise awareness and give hope to people when it comes to climate change. Justdiggit also started experimenting with communication in our projects in Africa. From radio, SMS, billboards, movie road shows, murals and even influencer marketing we refined a farmer based approach. We learned that farmers are very receptive to messages that promote simple regreening techniques that improve their lives both economically and ecologically. Therefore this became Justdiggit's key driver for change. Like Sir David Attenborough so wisely says:" The climate crisis in its essence is now a communication challenge."

Music has always been the language of Africa and the world, uniting people like nothing else. In 2019, pre Covid, Justdiggit and partners such as Backbone productions and NEP organised a music festival in Kenya, Tanzania and the Netherlands under the Raindance brand to celebrate the regreening achieved and to put a spotlight on the task ahead. It was a unique experience where the local communities in Tanzania and Kenya came together and were connected via a live connection to the people dancing in Amsterdam.

This communication approach has also created new partnerships with organisations such as the UN, African Union, COP26 and many others all of whom acknowledge the power of positive consumer / farmer facing storytelling to create meaningful and sustainable impact.

Justdiggit was also part of the launch of the UN decade on Ecosystem Restoration with our partner JCDecaux promoting the launch across Africa and Europe in over 26 countries, again completely sponsored.

In 2016 Wessel Koning joined Justdiggit to setup Justdiggit corporate partnerships and business development. To date hundreds of companies have joined Justdiggit’s mission to regreen lands and make meaningful impact.

Justdiggit provides tangible and measurable impacts, companies can regreen areas the size of the city they are based and report on concrete metrics such as m2 regreened, Co2 sequestered, people empowered and water saved, all of which can be attributed to many of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s)

Justdiggit has partnered with corporates and brands from all over the world, for instance with Tony’s Chocolonely, GreenChoice, Bridgestone / Webfleet Solutions, Caterpillar, KaiOs and many more.?With Timberland for Instance Justdiggit has already brought back millions of trees, and will reach over 10,000,000 trees by 2025, that is over 2x around the world if you would plant them 8 meters apart. This removes millions of tons of CO2 and empowers hundreds of thousands of people. It is time for business to step up and take charge in cooling down our planet.

Through working in Africa we became partner of the AFR100 initiative. This is an ambitious continent led program that aims to restore over 126 million hectares of degraded African soil before 2030. While speaking to Mamadou Diakhité and his team at the African Union we felt this story deserved a bigger audience. We reached out to The Good Energies Foundation ,JCDecaux and the legendary Yann Arthus Bertrand and were enabled to produce a documentary called "The Grand African Greenup" this documentary tells the story of the AFR100 ambition in a powerful way. Nat Geo Africa endorsed the movie and broadcasted it in more than 50 African countries and JCDecaux supported it with a Pan African billboard campaign reaching millions of people across the mother continent

As the UN has declared this decade as "The Decade on Ecosystem Restoration" our friends at Havas Lemz, Chester, Remco, Sven, Ellen and Willem designed a complete new brand identity for Justdiggit to make sure we can make a real impact here and now. Together with Safi Graauw we produced a new manifest film to re-introduce Justdiggit to the world.

Since music live events were not possible due to Covid we started looking into digital ways of using music to promote our cause. We teamed up with long time friend Don Diablo & Ty Dolla $ign to create a soundtrack for the decade. HavasLemz & Media Monks created a music video for Stream to Regreen. We produced a track and video from which all profits go to regreening in Africa and across platforms such as Youtube, Spotify, Apple Music and others we commit that for every 25 streams we will regreen 1m2 in our projects. To date we have realised more than 10 million streams and counting..

Recently we were invited at the COP 26 to speak about the potential of positive storytelling to combat climate change, Mary and Safi spoke some powerful words on our behalf

For the future we believe that combining simple regreening techniques with communication and mobile technology can create a true regreen revolution, which we are working on with many partners such as Havas, Restor, 1T.org, Facebook, JCDecaux, AFR100, UNEP, Nat Geo and many, many others..What if we can reach out directly to potentially 350 million small hold farmers in Sub Sahara Africa and inspire and activate them to regreen their own land using mobile technology?

There is so much more to this story that it feels incomplete always..I will keep posting updates and progress but for now I hope you will join us in making this the Decade of Doing ??