The Switch: Alice Kendall of Pledge for the Planet
What if your weekend run, swim or ride could do more than boost your fitness – but could also protect the planet? That’s the idea behind Pledge for the Planet, an environmental charity on a mission to activate everyday athletes to take climate action to protect the places we play.
Future Super member and keen marathon runner Alice Kendall founded Pledge for the Planet in 2019, and runs its annual 48 Hour Mission event, taking place on 26–28 September this year. Over the course of one weekend, sports clubs across the country go head-to-head in a friendly, high-energy competition to run, swim, cycle or walk as far as they can. Instead of paying entry fees, participants commit to an environmental pledge.
There are more than 40 pledges to choose from, from everyday actions like remembering your keep cup and reusable bags, to bigger pledges like going meat-free or switching to ethical finance. Each pledge, step, stroke and spin earns points on the activity and impact leaderboards, showing just how powerful collective action can be when sport and sustainability join forces.
As Alice says, “Not everyone can do everything, but everyone can do something.” By meeting people in the clubs and communities where they already thrive, the 48 Hour Mission proves that climate action can be competitive, fun and deeply connected to the places we love.
3 Questions with Alice
What gets you out of bed each day?
I love getting up early and heading out for a run or a swim, a bike ride or a walk before work. Getting out there and socialising before you've even had coffee, is a really powerful way to make friends that stick, and to do something for yourself every morning, before the rest of the day takes hold. It’s a beautiful way to set up the day and a great part of the 48 Hour Mission, because you really get to connect with people in the community in the space that they love. They're about to jump into the ocean and do their swim, or go hard on the track, so it’s a great time to connect with them about supporting climate action in a way that fits them.
How are you contributing to the planet beyond switching your super?
Well, there’s going out into the community and starting conversations, which I think everyone can do; we’re all able to influence in our own way. And then there are some habits that we bring to our everyday lives and can share that journey with others.
No one's perfect, but I try and do my best. Like eating less meat. Going vegetarian is something simple that suits me and my lifestyle. Trying to have as little plastic in the house as possible. Switching super is obviously such a powerful and easy action to take. And with all daily habits, just sort of thinking planet first with every decision that you make: keep-cups, reusables, renewables, active-transport, conversations, voting. There’s so much we can all do, so it’s finding what fits into our lifestyles.
Then there’s Pledge for the Planet and the 48 Hour Mission, which was born by accident. I’d always wanted to use marathons as a force for good, a way to influence communities to engage with important causes. So I created a platform where you can use action as currency to support people doing marathons, triathlons, ironmans, 10k walks, whatever it might be, and we launched that in 2019.
But then Covid hit and all the races and community events were cancelled. So we had to pivot and work out other ways to connect with these run clubs, swim clubs, cycle clubs, and the places that we play. So we created the 48 Hour Mission as a way for these communities to connect and take action during lockdown. We flipped our ‘action-as-currency’ model into ‘pledge-as-ticket’, and kept it that way. We started with 7 or 8 clubs and now, in our fifth year, we’re hoping to hit 40.
What people-powered movement is making a difference in 2025?
There’s so much good stuff going on amid the doom and gloom; so many glimmers of hope and so many people-powered movements doing incredible things.
But one that has really shone through recently for me is an organisation called TriMob, all about getting First Nations people into the sport of triathlon to improve the health, wellbeing and representation of First Nations people in these really tough endurance challenges where they’ve been underrepresented. The founder, Nat Heath, is an incredible human, and he's made it his mission to bring as many people into the sport as possible.
In just five years they’ve already doubled the number of First Nations people taking part in Ironman races, one of the toughest endurance races that you can do. It’s incredible stuff they’re doing. They worked with the Sydney Marathon on their First Nations strategy; I personally have never seen a race take First Nations history so seriously and put it front and centre of everything they were doing. It was just a beautiful moment of bringing First Nations culture into sport, but also making it really accessible. It's bringing more and more people into the sport and making sure that anybody who wants to take part can do so.
They're absolutely awesome. They do have some spots open for Noosa Triathlon – which is notoriously hard to get tickets for – so that might be a great way to get involved and support the initiative.