To raise awareness of the upcoming COP30, the Efeca team and friends are taking on the challenge of ‘walking’ from Bournemouth to Belém (Brazil), where this year’s COP is being hosted. Our goal is to raise £1,000 for Grounded Community, an amazing charity based in the Bournemouth area that is dedicated to providing access to healthy, nutritious food for everyone, through a variety of sustainable food initiatives.

Our challenge

We will start this ‘walk’ on Thursday 11th September giving us 60 days to ‘reach’ Belem by the beginning of COP30 (Monday 10th November). The core team will track their daily steps which will be recorded on an app to track the overall group’s step progress. We will update our progress weekly through our LinkedIn - so please follow along! Along the way, we will be joined by various friends and special guests to help us reach our target step goal.

• Distance from Bournemouth to Belém = 4,522 miles

• Target step goal = 9,044,000 steps

Do you want to be an Efeca friend and join us on our challenge to walk from Bournemouth to Belém, walking those 4,522 miles? Let us know through your main Efeca contact or in the comments below, and we will be in touch. We would love as many people as possible to join our challenge and to support Grounded Community.

Who we are supporting: Grounded Community

Based in Boscombe, Bournemouth, Grounded Community’s mission is ‘growing together’, empowering the local area through sustainable food initiatives whilst creating a community that is truly ‘grounded’.

In collaboration with local schools, residents and organisations, Grounded Community creates spaces to promote sustainability, well-being and education. Amongst many other projects, the charity grows fruit and vegetables, provides education and workshops, has its own bee hives, redistributes food surplus to those in need, and creates community compost to tackle food waste.

By supporting our ‘walk’ to Belém, you will enable Grounded Community to continue expanding its vital projects that are nurturing a thriving and resilient community and providing a much-needed support network for so many individuals in Bournemouth. We would love to raise £1,000 which could fund two beehives (and their beekeeper), a full raised bed installation for a low-income family, including soil and plants, and enable a half day gardening workshop for 15 people. Or Grounded Community might use the money raised to do something entirely different - £10 enables 10 collections of surplus food to be redistributed, £25 pays for their composting team to process food waste from 10 local businesses. £7.50 could enable a low-income family to attend their Little Gardeners play group. They could do so much with your donation, so please do donate.

Why?

The UNFCCC’s Conference of the Parties (COP) is responsible for decision-making on the implementation of commitments to tackle climate change. This year is the 30th conference - COP30. Hosted in Brazil, COP30 is especially important in that it provides an opportunity for Latin America to lead on issues related to climate justice and to position challenges such as deforestation in the Amazon at the forefront.

In a world of carbon emissions through international flights, we thought we would ‘walk’ to COP30 to virtually attend. We want to raise awareness of the importance of this COP, positioning global south perspectives whilst tackling global commitments to climate change, aligning with Efeca’s work.

Here's some of our Efeca team from our last walk in June 2025...