Real Hope Initiative Launches EducateHer Climate Initiative in Bradford, with GenCGov as Academic Partner
There’s a particular kind of room that doesn’t come along often: one where a sixteen-year-old and a Nobel-calibre research team are, for once, speaking the exact same language. That room existed for one afternoon at the University of Bradford — and it was called the launch of the EducateHer Climate Initiative.
Part policy briefing. Part art exhibition. Part declaration that the next generation of climate leaders in this city will be young, will be women, and will come from the communities that are usually talked about in climate conversations but almost never handed the microphone.
The idea that changes everything
Here’s the premise EducateHer is built on, and it’s one of those ideas that seems obvious the moment you hear it, yet somehow upends almost everything about how climate policy actually gets made:
The girls most affected by the climate crisis are also the girls most capable of solving it, if someone finally gives them the tools, the space, and the belief that their leadership matters. – Chelsea Agbasiere
Climate change was never gender-neutral. Floods, heat, food insecurity, displacement — they land hardest on women and girls, and hardest of all on those already navigating racial and economic marginalisation. And yet the rooms where climate priorities get decided are still, overwhelmingly, rooms without them.
EducateHer exists to change who’s in the room. It puts girls and young women from Bradford’s Black and Minority Ethnic communities directly into the conversation or, more often, helps them build an entirely new table when the old one won’t make space.
The people who made it real
The engine behind EducateHer is Real Hope Initiative CIC, a Bradford-based community interest company founded in 2018. Its CEO, Chelsea Agbasiere, a humanitarian lawyer, UN Women Young Leader, and someone who has spent her career turning “someone should really do something about this” into real mentorship, real education, real advocacy, has led the organisation from grassroots beginnings into the force behind the boldest programme it’s ever launched: a community-owned, intersectional climate leadership initiative, built from the ground up around the actual lives of the girls it serves.
They didn’t do it alone.
Voice4Change England (V4CE) shaped the programme’s framework and secured its funding through their Where Climate Meets Race strategy, with backing from the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation — the infrastructure and resourcing that turned a bold idea into a living, running programme.
GenCGov (Gender Inclusive Climate Change Governance), hosted at the University of Bradford led by Dr Pedi Obani under her UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship, stepped in as academic partner. GenCGov’s work already spans the UK, Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa, pushing climate governance toward genuine gender inclusion, and for this launch, they lent both research rigour and their roof, hosting the event itself.
Three organisations. Three roles. One shared conviction: girls aged 14 to 29 from Bradford’s BME communities deserve more than to simply be affected by climate change. They deserve to lead the response to it.
What EducateHer actually does
- Climate-Smart Education & Leadership workshops — real data, real leadership skills, no watered-down version of either.
- Climate Cafés — informal, honest spaces to talk about the environmental problems on their own streets and how those problems tangle with racial inequality.
- Girl-Led Community Climate Action — hands-in-the-soil, nature-based projects across Bradford, designed and run by the participants themselves.
- Climate Meets Race Conference — a stage where these young women bring the receipts: evidence gathered, lessons learned, policy demands made.
- Community Research & Evidence — the quiet, unglamorous work of building a local evidence base solid enough that other UK cities can copy the model.
- When the walls started talking
If you want to know what this programme feels like, rather than what it says on paper, you needed to stand in front of the paintings.
The exhibition centred on new work by Immanuel Obani, a Bradford-based visual artist and creative technologist commissioned by Real Hope Initiative to give the launch its emotional core. Two large acrylic pieces, Rooted in Her and She Carries the Tide, rendered women, gender equality, climate justice and resilience not as talking points but as bodies, water, roots. Impossible to scroll past. A quieter third piece, The Water Remembers, sat beside them, saying just as much with far less noise.
Obani didn’t hang the work and walk away. He led a session titled “Art as Evidence: Seeing the Climate Crisis on Canvas,” making the case that a painting can carry proof the same way a dataset can, just in a different register entirely.
He also created a tree, made specifically for GenCGov to answer three questions: What is climate change? How does it affect us? What can we do about it? No caption needed. You look at the tree, and you already understand the argument.
A room worth remembering
Beyond the art and the agenda, the launch was simply a good room to be in, the kind of afternoon that leaves you with more energy than you arrived with. Chelsea Agbasiere and the Real Hope Initiative team hosted. Voice4Change England watched their funding become a living, breathing programme. Dr Pedi Obani spoke for GenCGov. Guests including Jennifer Wat and Jessica Webber showed up to witness what happens when grassroots urgency and academic evidence finally sit at the same table instead of talking past each other.
And that’s the point GenCGov keeps returning to across all of its work: research is only as good as its connection to the people it’s meant to serve. EducateHer gives that connection a name, a city, and now — a room full of paintings to prove it’s real.
This is where you come in
Do you know a girl or young woman aged 14 to 29 in Bradford’s BME communities who has something to say about the world she’s inheriting? EducateHer was built for her. Send her our way, and reach out to Real Hope Initiative CIC to find out how she can get involved.
GenCGov is proud to stand behind Real Hope Initiative’s leadership on this programme and we’ll be right there for what comes next: the Climate Cafés, the community research, the Where Climate Meets Race Conference.
This is only the opening chapter.
