Request for proposals: Developing a strategy to guide community engagement and campaigning for Breathe Cities At Clean Air Fund

Brief description:

Breathe Cities, a partnership between Clean Air Fund and C40 Cities, is a new initiative to improve urban air quality and tackle climate emissions. Clean Air Fund is launching a Request for Proposals to help develop the strategic approach to Breathe Cities’ campaigning and mobilising public support component for air quality. The overall goal of this work is to develop guidance that supports city-level Breathe Cities staff in developing a strategy and identifying grantees in support of this strategy.

More details on the request for proposal and background on Clean Air Fund and the project can be found here: https://s40026.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/Breathe-Cities-Community-and-Campaigning-RFP.pdf

What we are after:

We are seeking proposals to help Clean Air Fund and our partners to develop the strategic approach to Breathe Cities’ campaigning and mobilising public support component. The overall goal of this work is to develop guidance that supports city-level Breathe Cities staff in developing a strategy and identifying grantees in support of this strategy.

This guidance should help Breathe Cities staff to develop their strategies more easily, by providing some pointers to best practices and past learnings, and how to assess cities political context and needs that will shape the strategy. It should also help to ensure that Clean Air Fund, as a regranter, is well equipped to play its enabling and convening role and provide support to civil society organisations to support movement building around air pollution. It should ultimately help provide a certain level of consistency in the campaigning and mobilising public support component across cities, whilst recognising the variety of needs and local contexts.

Below is a set of indicative questions we would like this work to help us answer. We welcome proposers to suggest additional questions to effectively target this work:

• How can Clean Air Fund and its partners best support its city-level Breathe Cities staff to identify and respond to the needs in terms of campaigning and mobilising public support for air quality, building on past experiences, whilst acknowledging the specificities of each city’s context?
• What examples of air quality city-level campaign (or other relevant type of campaign supporting city-level policy change) successes and failures could Breathe Cities learn from, and are there any learnings and best practices from these examples, that can be useful to Breathe Cities approach?
• Are there any key principles that should be followed by all Breathe Cities to have a consistent, yet locally tailored approach to mobilising public support at city level for ambitious air quality action?
• How can we integrate past learnings around how to build public support for specific air-quality policies that comes with specific challenges (for example Low Emission Zones)?
• Are there any common tools or process guidance that can be developed to support city-level Breathe Cities staff (for example to assess the campaigning and community engagement needs and priorities, conduct stakeholder/partners mapping or negotiate grants)?
• How can campaigning and mobilising public support component join up with the other pillars of Breathe Cities: using data to drive awareness and change, taking into account that cities are supported to enact ambitious policies, creating complementary insider/outsider approaches while maintaining the independence of all parties? How can Clean Air Fund and C40 support this across pillars and actors?
• What guidance, principles, lessons, or best practices are there for constructive engagement between civil society organisations (grantees) and city governments, to create dialogues that can build relationships and drive change, and how could the campaigning and mobilising public support component of Breathe Cities support grantees to effectively engage with cities?

We are asking applicants to propose a set of deliverables in their application that will help translate these questions into concise, accessible and useful guidance for our city staff. As an indication, deliverables could include some of the following, among other ideas:

• Case studies of air pollution (or related) campaigns in a variety of contexts including Global South Cities,
• In depth analysis of past air pollution campaigns to identify what worked and or did not work and what increased public engagement,
• A recorded training webinar/presentation about how to identify and support effective air quality campaign grants
• A list of best practices or principles for gaining public support for specific type of air quality policies and to follow for the campaigning and mobilising public support component of Breathe Cities in general,
• Blueprints or templates to support staff identify needs and most appropriate approach to community engagement in specific contexts.

To note, there will be the opportunity to directly work with one or several cities that will be developing their strategies at the time of the consultancy, to test and pilot ideas.

Proposal requirements

• We welcome consortia of organisations/consultants to bid, to bring in broader expertise, where necessary
• Breathe Cities will be primarily delivered with global south cities, and we encourage applicants to consider how this geographical diversity will be reflected in delivery.
• Proposals should:
  • include organisation/company profiles and short bios of project team members (in annex)
  • provide a clear outline of proposed deliverables and how they contribute to the goal
  • provide a timeline and budget based around key activities and/or milestones
  • declare any conflict of interests, or possible vested interests, which could influence the strategic choices recommended
• Participants should be prepared to hold regular project calls with the Breathe Cities team who are based in UK and USA time zones.
• Skills expected:
  • The ability to bring people together, work in partnership
  • Deep experience in strategy development, ideally for large, philanthropically funded programmes
  • Deep experience with community engagement and campaigning
  • Demonstrated experience applying equity lens to project planning and development
  • Comprehensive technical understanding of air pollution
  • Ability to communicate complex subjects in succinct and layperson-friendly, accessible ways
  • Ability to work quickly

We envisage the strategy development and associated deliverables in this brief to take not more than 3 months. We invite respondents to propose a deliverables list, with a short rationale as to how this will reach the goal, and a budget, or different budget options, to deliver the proposed work. Value for money will be assessed as part of the selection criteria.