What we hope to leave behind: Introducing our Lifetime Impact Report 2019-2025

Image by Rich Baybutt. Words by Rach Coleman

One of the things that drew me most to working at TFT was the organisational objective of obsolescence. Even in its nascent form 4.5 years ago when I joined the team, it still felt completely unique across the outdoor and environment sector. It's this idea that we are aiming to make ourselves redundant as an organisation - to get to a point where the 7 of us who sit behind desks and travel hundreds of miles about the country delivering events and trail cleans on behalf of TFT, don't need to do it anymore.

It's not an objective of hopelessness - it's quite the opposite. It's an objective built on the ambition that for our community, DIO will become an everyday ritual. It's built on the ambition of our work with government, which will help end our reliance on single-use products and plastic packaging. It's built on the hope that we will advocate for our trails so well in the next 5 years, international frameworks will recognise their value and enforce an equity of action to protect them.

We have always said we don't want to get on the hamster wheel of litter picking, of the game of blame and shame that has pervaded the public conversation on single-use pollution for decades. The last 6 years have been some of an experiment; if you change the narrative from one of anger and aggression, to one of posivitiy, community and action, could we actually achieve Trash Free Trails?

We today release a Report that begins to answer that question with a resounding yes. We are successfully working towards making ourselves obsolete.

Image by Rich Baybutt

Our Lifetime Impact Report 2019-2025 is something like a Sparks Notes summary of the story of TFT so far. But instead of simply telling you what happened, we've gotten right into the juicy analysis you need for your GCSE English Lit exam. Through data, Case Studies and analysis, we are beginning to capture real, tangible information on what's changing - for individuals, for trail communities, and for the places we love and adventure in.

This has been something of a mammoth undertaking - Rich, our Associate Director, actually began work on this Report in late 2024 - and the product of many hands. For me, the process as well as the product reflects our ambition and philosophy - that when we come together, we create the change we hope to see and we capture stories that reflect it back to the world. We hope if you take anything from this Report, it's how important this is in this divisive and challenging time.

Perhaps it's strange that this Report fills me with hope - even if that hope means I might be out of the job in 5 years. In such a short space of time our community has achieved so much, and the world around them is changing, thanks to their efforts - there will come a time when we aren't needed anymore, because environmental stewardship isn't really powered by organisations like us. It's propelled by the everyday actions of passionate and caring individuals. To know one day soon we might step out of the virtual office for the final time, and know that someone, somewhere, is connecting with nature and protecting it along the way - that's a pretty sweet reason to need to find a new job, don't you think?

Read our Lifetime Impact Report 2019-2025 here.