Campaign Sample 1

The Changing Markets Foundation was formed to accelerate and scale up solutions to sustainability challenges by leveraging the power of markets.

Worldview

With widespread acceptance of the urgency of action on sustainability we need to align markets to society’s values and beliefs. This requires major changes in markets, with companies acting on sustainability gaining market share at the expense of those who neglect it. Achieving this will drive a self-reinforcing, accelerating loop of change in global markets and also serve as a driver of progressive legislation, which will level the playing field.

Our strategy, and our theory of change, is based on three central ideas:

01

Society needs transformational change

incremental improvement will not be enough to address the systemic threats society faces. We need a low-carbon, clean and circular economy that shares prosperity fairly – and we need progress towards this urgently.

02

Markets can help deliver the change

Markets can help deliver the change – transformational change needs companies that have environmentally and socially advanced products and values, to rapidly succeed at the expense of companies that don’t. If this occurs at sufficient scale it will drive a self-reinforcing, accelerating loop of change in global markets.

03

More can be achieved

When key companies in a specific sector have invested in transformation, they have an interest to also change policy environment to level the playing field. This cements progressive change at the political level.

Meet the team

Picture of Nusa Urbancic

Nusa Urbancic

CEO

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Nusa Urbancic

CEO

Nusa has been with the Changing Markets Foundation since it was founded in 2015 and her role was to set up the organisation’s main office in London and to manage the team of Changing Markets campaigners. Until July 2023 she worked as Changing Markets Campaigns Director leading the development of strategies and overseeing the implementation of the Foundations’ campaigns, research and media work. In July 2023 she took over as the CEO of the Foundation.

Before joining Changing Markets, she worked for over 6 years in Brussels-based NGO Transport & Environment leading its Energy programme, advocating for more climate-friendly European policies on transport fuels. She played a leading role in running and coordinating European campaigns against unsustainable biofuels, unconventional oil and promoting transport electrification, resulting in significant political reforms. She designed T&E’s political advocacy strategy, coordinated research and fund-raising. Before joining T&E, Nusa worked at the European office of Greenpeace on the renewable energy campaign and she also gained experience as a free-lance journalist and translator.

Nusa has an MA in International Relations from the University of Ljubljana and an LLM in Human Rights from the London-based Birkbeck University. She speaks Slovenian, English, French and Spanish and has lived in Belgium, France and in the UK. In her free time, she enjoys reading, yoga, skiing, hiking and other outdoor activities.

About 19

Elaine Girvan

Finance & Admin Director

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Elaine Girvan

Finance & Admin Director

Elaine joined Changing Markets in July 2017 and looks after all the operational and financial aspects of the organisation. Prior to joining Changing Markets Elaine worked as a systems accountant in a number of not-for-profit organisations, including the National Theatre and the Alzheimer’s Society. For the majority of her career Elaine has spent her time helping and advising organisations on ways to improve their business and financial operations.

Elaine is originally from Northern Ireland and shortly after relocating to the Netherlands she returned to study and completed an MSc in Sustainable Development at Utrecht University, with a focus on Environmental Governance. Elaine has a particular interest in the issues surrounding food insecurity and alongside her work at Changing Markets she is a Trustee of Eggcup, a food club in the North of England that gathers and redistributes surplus food to those in need.

Elaine enjoys spending time outdoors and is a keen music fan.

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Urška Trunk

Campaign Manager

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Urška Trunk

Campaign Manager

Urška joined the Changing Markets Foundation in 2017 and has worked across campaigns on fashion and fisheries. Before joining the Changing Markets Foundation, Urška worked at a Brussels-based NGO, Carbon Market Watch, as the Climate Finance Policy Officer, advocating for more effective and accountable use of climate finance that does not cause social or environmental harm. She was responsible for implementing Carbon Market Watch campaigns at the international and EU level focusing on sustainable development, human rights and public participation in the EU Emission Trading System (EU ETS), Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions (NAMAs) and the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).

Prior to that, Urška worked at the Institute for European Environmental Policy in Brussels and the European Commission Representation Office in Slovenia.

Born and raised in Slovenia, Urška read European Studies at the University of Ljubljana and graduated from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium with a Master’s Degree in European Politics and Policies. Now based in Brussels, Urska enjoys exploring new cuisines, playing music, doing sports and outdoor activities. She speaks English, Slovenian, Croatian and some French.

About 5

Alma Castrejon-Davila

Senior Campaigner

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Alma Castrejon-Davila

Senior Campaigner

Alma joined Changing Markets in October 2021 as a Senior Campaigner. Prior to this, Alma worked for over 7 years at WWF-UK and WWF International as a Senior Campaign Manager working on a range of environmental campaigns: engaging the general public to foster political action towards climate change; tackling illegal and unsustainable timber entering the EU market; protecting UNESCO World Heritage sites from harmful industrial activities; stopping deforestation and conversion in our food production; making sure climate and justice was at the heart of the UK Government’s COVID-19 recovery package; advocating for protection and restoration of UK seas; and started working on a campaign to fix our broken food system. While at WWF, Alma also had the opportunity to support the International Gorilla Conservation Programme with the creation of a multi-country (Rwanda, Uganda, and DRC) advocacy comms strategy that it is currently implemented.

Born and raised in Mexico, she holds an arts degree in tourism, as international cultures and languages have been of great interest to her. But it was her passion to environmental work that made her make a career switch. This switch has allowed her to do community outreach, wildlife rescue and rehabilitation, and local campaigning and organising. Lover of nature, she lives by the coast, and in her spare time, she enjoys hiking, swimming, and nature and wildlife photography. She speaks Spanish, English and French.

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Maddy Haughton-Boakes

Senior Campaigner

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Maddy Haughton-Boakes

Senior Campaigner

Maddy is a Senior Campaigner at Changing Markets Foundation, having joined in April 2022. Prior to this she was Campaigns Manager at CPRE, the countryside charity where she worked across several campaigns including for a deposit return scheme in the UK and on issues ranging from nature based solutions to climate change to racism in the countryside. Maddy’s entry to the NGO and charity sector was through the CharityWorks graduate programme in 2015.

Outside of work Maddy’s commitment to climate justice manifests in her voluntary work which over the years has been for Green New Deal Rising, Green New Deal London, and a community run library and community fridge. She has an MSc in Global Environmental Politics and Policy from Birkbeck College, University of London and studied History and Sociology for her undergraduate degree at Sheffield University.

In her spare time Maddy enjoys being by or in the sea, drinking coffee, yoga, seeing friends and going on long walks – which in 2021 included walking over 250 miles from Southampton to Canterbury on an ancient path.

About 17

Caitlin Smith

Senior Campaigner

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Caitlin Smith

Senior Campaigner

Caitlin joined Changing Markets in December 2023 after 6 years with Save the Children International, most recently leading their climate and inequality campaign in the Middle East, North Africa, and Eastern Europe regions. Caitlin has worked across a number of campaigns in her career, including on climate, girls’ empowerment, and protecting children in conflict and is passionate about social and climate justice. Throughout her time campaigning she has worked to ensure children have a central and meaningful voice in climate action and decision-making, as well as working closely with youth-led groups, including at COP. Caitlin likes to be creative in her approach to campaigning using tools like artivism (art + activism) and storytelling to engage with young people and adults.

Growing up in Scotland, Caitlin likes to spend much of her time hiking or walking on the beach and enjoys being away with her tent and a backpack. Last year she cycled through the Outer Hebrides, wild camping along the way. She has a BA (Hons) in International Politics from the University of Stirling, and an MSc in Global Governance and Diplomacy from the University of Oxford, receiving academic excellence awards in both degrees.

About 6

Lily Roberts

Campaigns Adviser

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Lily Roberts

Campaigns Adviser

Lily joined Changing Markets in January 2024. Lily comes from a background in public policy and sustainable finance and joins from ShareAction, where she advocated for responsible investment and corporate behaviour, mobilising stakeholders to drive positive social and environmental impact through shareholder activism. Lily has worked across a number of campaigns targeting global corporations — from promoting consumer health to addressing air quality and worker wellbeing. Central to all campaigns is Lily’s commitment to ensuring the voices of those with lived experience shape engagement and decision-making.

Lily holds a BSc in Social Science from the University of Bath. In her free time, you’ll find Lily crocheting, delving into books and experimenting with new recipes in the kitchen.

About 15

Joakim Bergman

Founder & Executive Chair

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Joakim Bergman

Founder & Executive Chair

Joakim calls himself a campaign junkie. Swedish by origin, he studied law but soon after landed at Greenpeace, where he discovered his passion for campaigns. In the early 1990’s his time as Campaign Director of Greenpeace Sweden saw some of the organisation’s earliest innovation in market campaigns, including on chlorine bleaching in the pulp and paper industry and the PVC campaign. He went on in Greenpeace to various roles including CEO of Greenpeace Sweden, Deputy CEO of Greenpeace International and a board member of Greenpeace USA and Central and Eastern Europe.

In 1996, Joakim established and ran a solutions focused market campaigning business in Sweden. Over nearly two decades he has developed unique experience in using campaigning to drive market growth strategies for sustainable products for large international corporations. His clients have included companies in forestry, health and nutrition, building materials and recycling.

Joakim has also worked at Action Aid Sweden, advising them on how to become a campaigning organization and advised numerous other NGOs on how to improve their campaigning. Joakim has lived in the Netherlands and Australia, where he developed a passion for surfing. He is now based with his family in a small fishing village in the south of Sweden despite the lack of surfing opportunities.

About 16

Paul Gilding

Founder

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Paul Gilding

Founder

Paul Gilding has spent 40 years trying to change the world, doing everything he can think of. He’s served in the Australian military, chased nuclear armed aircraft carriers in small inflatable boats, campaigned on human rights, plugged up industrial waste discharge pipes, been global CEO of Greenpeace, become a visiting Fellow at Cambridge University, started and run two successful companies and advised the Boards, CEOs and executives of some the world’s largest companies.

Paul is now an independent author, strategy advisor and entrepreneur for a sustainable economy. He has worked with the Boards and executives of many leading global companies including Unilever, BHP Billiton, DSM, Ford and DuPont and is a widely recognised global authority on the economic and business implications of sustainability and climate change. He is a Fellow at the University of Cambridge’s Institute for Sustainability Leadership where he researches and teaches on the inevitable global economic transformation around sustainability.

In 2011 Bloomsbury published his widely acclaimed book “The Great Disruption” which has since been translated for publication in Germany, The Netherlands and Brazil. His views have been featured in major media outlets around the world including by Pulitzer Prize winning writer Tom Friedman in the New York Times, where Friedman concluded “Ignore Gilding at your peril.” He now travels the world alerting people to the global economic and ecological crisis now unfolding around us, as the world economy reaches and passes the limits to growth.

He is confident we can get through what’s coming and in fact thinks we will rise to the occasion, with change on a scale and at a speed incomprehensible today. He tells us to get prepared for The Great Disruption and “the end of shopping”, as we reinvent the global economy and our model of social progress.

He lives on a farm in southern Tasmania, Australia with his wife, where they grow vegetables and raise chickens, pigs and their children.

His blog, The Cockatoo Chronicles, and more background can be found at www.paulgilding.com

About us

Purpose

The Changing Markets Foundation was formed to accelerate and scale up solutions to sustainability challenges by leveraging the power of markets.

Working in partnership with NGOs, other foundations and research organisations, we create and support campaigns that shift market share away from unsustainable products and companies and towards environmentally and socially beneficial solutions.

To address sustainability, we need to withdraw our support for those companies that are damaging society. If we do so at scale, we can create a self-reinforcing accelerating loop of positive change in global markets – change defined by the most sustainability-focused companies succeeding and forcing others to follow their lead.

We now know what society needs to do to address sustainability challenges and we have the means to act. Whether the driver is water scarcity, food availability, inequality, resource constraint or climate change, few people today question the need to do things differently. We need change – in the products we consume, how they are manufactured and how they are marketed.

However, despite strong community concern about these issues and growing acceptance of their urgency, sustainable solutions are not being taken to scale fast enough.

To address this requires integrated social change and market shifts – we need to mobilise community concern to shift market demand.

Using campaigning to drive such change presents a great opportunity for accelerating social and environmental progress. That’s why we formed Changing Markets.

How We Work

We believe that NGOs have a critical role to play in driving market and policy change. We use our team’s extensive knowledge, experience and networks in sustainability, policy and campaigning to identify:

  • Critical issues that require urgent action and can be won by leveraging the power of the markets
  • Campaign ideas and strategies that will engage and mobilise people.

We then design and support the resulting campaigns to promote shifts in markets that support sustainability.

We do so by:

  • Building successful NGO coalitions – with advice, support and funding – to run innovative campaigns that more effectively activate market shifts;
  • Conducting research, including market and supply-chain investigations that help advance the campaigns that we support;

Our capacity to achieve this unusually combines world-class campaigning skills, experience and networks from the NGO, policy and business worlds. It is the synergies between these that set us apart, helping us to combine an understanding of all of these worlds to accelerate sustainable change.

Policy Plan

For more information about Changing Markets Foundation, our strategy and our way of working, please download our Policy Plan.

Privacy Policy

For more information about how the Changing Markets Foundation handles your data, please read our Privacy Policy.

Who We Are

The Changing Markets Foundation was formed by Joakim Bergman and Paul Gilding – lifelong campaigners on environmental and social issues who decades ago recognised the potential in leveraging market forces to help drive change. The Foundation was formed to design and support campaigns that accelerate and scale up solutions to sustainability challenges by leveraging the power of markets. The central organisation is registered in the Netherlands as Stichting Changing Markets. For more information on our structure and formal registration numbers see Contact.

Paul and Joakim both have a deep history in campaigning with over 30 years working inside NGOs on both environmental and social questions. They have learnt the lessons on what does and doesn’t work in driving change.

But unusually, they also have a deep understanding of markets and business. Between them they’ve advised CEOs of global corporations on sustainability strategy, run countless campaigns to build markets for new products and owned and run their own entrepreneurial companies. They’ve done this while maintaining close connections and credibility with both the NGO and corporate sectors around the world, as well as maintaining high-level influence and thought leadership on global developments in sustainability.

The combined experience of the founders and our team brings to Changing Markets knowledge on how to create market change and, most critically given the urgency of the current global context, how to accelerate it.

The Changing Markets Foundation generates income through a combination of:

  • funds generated by the founders’ other activities, including their strategic advice to companies with advanced sustainability performance;
  • other foundations that want to support market shifts as a way of driving change.

The Foundation maintains full, independent control over its campaigns, their strategy and their direction. This ensures the campaigns stay sharply focused on the purpose of accelerating change on sustainability.

Spotlight

Want to join our team? Check out our careers page.

Careers

Annual Reports

You can read and download our annual reports and financial statements below.

 

ANBI (Public Benefit Organisation) information

Additionally you can read and download our ANBI (Public Benefit Organisation) information here.

Standaardformulier publicatieplicht ANBI Algemeen

2022

In 2022 we doubled down on exposing corporate greenwashing with the launch of www.greenwash.com. The purpose of this initiative is to highlight how greenwashing, which has proliferated and started to receive increased public scrutiny over recent years, looks in practice. Read the full Annual Report and the Financial Report here.

2021

In early 2021, we were working hard on the launch of our brand-new campaign, Fossil Fashion. Our first report with the same name exposed how the growth of cheap synthetic fibres, produced from oil and gas, has become the back bone of the fast-fashion industry. Read the full Annual Report and the Financial Report here.

 

2020

One major area we have sought to tackle is the uptick in greenwashing over the past few years, as businesses have responded to people’s concern for the planet and desire for ‘greener’ products. But unfortunately, they often stop at communicating, instead of truly implementing the changes and solutions needed in their products and supply chains. Read the full Annual Report and the Financial Report here.

 

2019

An increasingly turbulent decade was coming to an end in 2019. Wildfires raged in several regions of the world, and there were more stark warnings about extreme weather events and the state of our forests and oceans. Meanwhile, politicians rarely took determined action, often only paying lip service to solutions. All of this highlighted the importance – now more than ever – of accountability. Read the full Annual Report and the Financial Report here.

 

2018

Our Dirty Fashion campaign successfully exposed polluting viscose manufacturers and the brands buying from them. After the launch of our second report, we finally started to see some action. Five major fashion brands and retailers signed up to our Roadmap and committed to implementing closed-loop production systems in their viscose supply chains by 2023–25. Read the full Annual Report and the Financial Report here.

2017

In our short existence we have run many successful campaigns, aiming to expose irresponsible corporate behaviour and force companies to act on issues that they would prefer to ignore. Our first campaign victory with SumOfUs was to successfully convince Sainsbury’s, Waitrose and Asda to stop selling food supplements made from krill, as this fishery is undermining the bottom of the Antarctic food chain. Read the full Annual Report and the Financial Report here.