Luc Gauci Green meets a Barnet-based environmental educator shortlisted for London eco award

Rows of people sitting in cinema style seating — Attendees at the London Eco Champion Awards – (Credit – Tanya Vora)

A Barnet-based educator celebrated being shortlisted for a prestigious environmental award at a ceremony last month.

Jessica Robinson, an education lead for environmental charity EcoJudaism, was shortlisted for the London Eco Champion Awards 2025 for her work on educating primary school children on the climate crisis and biodiversity loss, specifically through the lens of Jewish identity and teachings.

Barnet Post spoke to her at the awards ceremony, hosted by the London Clean Air Initiative, a non-profit that engages, educates and empowers London’s communities to take collective action for clean air and sustainability. The ceremony, on Monday, 24^th November, recognised a range of ‘eco champions’ from young children to adults and organisations who go above and beyond to protect the environment.

With a record number of nominations, this year marked a big step up for the awards. The running theme of the night was celebrating the extraordinary actions taken by normal people who care. Sophia Kesteven, partnerships manager at Octopus Energy, emphasised this in her opening speech, explaining “small changes can lead to big impact” and “every action builds momentum and every voice brings another”.

Jessica was shortlisted as a London Eco Champion in the Local Leaders category for transforming environmental education in Jewish faith schools. She said: “We’re motivated at EcoJudaism by a concern that the Jewish community doesn’t take enough action on the climate and biodiversity crisis”.

At EcoJudaism, they deal with this through education, taking action and advocacy on both the national and international stage. The day before the award ceremony they took part in a river clean for Mitzvah and Jessica explained her manager, Naomi, was not in attendance because she was at the COP climate talks in Brazil.

As education lead, Jessica has a particular focus on young people. She cites climate anxiety as a big issue, something she has suffered from “a lot”. She worries that “young people are being brought into a world where they’re told this bad news, and they’re just left.”

At EcoJudaism they urge support for young people, whether emotionally or through action, which they say is the “antidote to anxiety”. Their courses take them very quickly to taking action. They have four sessions, each centred around universal themes: life, water, air and soil. In the final one they plant trees, flowers and more to help improve the local area.

The four themes are important as they are all things “we are hugely polluting through human activity and they’re also things which have such incredibly integrated hooks in Jewish learning,” so much so, she says that some Jewish schools find it hard to know which part of their teaching to deliver the courses in. “The whole point is to show that it’s a fundamental part of their Jewish identity.”

The work at EcoJudaism is uniting regardless of which Jewish community people belong to, Jessica says: “We’re all from very different denominations but we are united by the drive to take urgent action on the very, very pressing climate crisis and the horrific loss of biodiversity.

“It brings people together because they’re working for a common cause. In Judaism, there’s a big history of fighting for social justice and as we know climate change is an issue of social justice.”

Jessica says that having other people to share climate anxiety as well as action with is really helpful to people, “part of the reason I wanted to come tonight is [it] just fills me with hope and joy to see young people up there and just making changes and it makes me feel quite emotional”.

EcoJudaism is focused on expanding across the London area and hopefully becoming UK-wide. They have now developed a teacher training programme, calling teachers at Jewish primary schools to learn how to deliver their projects and support them in delivering sustainability plans.

The next training is on 9^th December but they are also offering two other days on 26^th January and 13^th May. The teachers “only need to come to one session, it’s three hours in the morning and we provide them with a Kosher breakfast.”

The training is linked to the Department for Education’s stipulation for all education settings to have a climate action plan and a sustainability lead. EcoJudaism is also working closely with Barnet Council for delivering the plan. Global ambitions for the course could be part of EcoJudaism’s future, already delivering advocacy on the international stage and having links with organisations in other countries.

Empowering young people is hugely important to Jessica and “one of the main reasons [she] wanted to do this role and one of the main drivers for the course”. Whether young or old, EcoJudaism empowers people to not be scared and make positive change. It also builds a sense of community which empowers in a different way.

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