Driving childhood sexual violence To Zero for To Zero

Millions of acts of sexual violence are perpetrated against children around the world. It has profound consequences for their lives, their potential and their place in the world. The impact reaches far beyond survivors: to families, communities and our societies.

To Zero exists to change this. It is a bold and ambitious, timebound initiative to support Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) in envisaging what it will take to end childhood sexual violence within a generation and strengthen the case for support to rapidly scale successes and nurture innovation.

But as a new initiative working across a diverse sector driven by passionate actors around the world, To Zero needed to arrive in the right way, focus on inclusivity and be clear on its purpose and process.Claremont joined To Zero’s Implementation Team, leading on strategic communications needs. The team saw us working in partnership with the initiative director, specialists in evaluation, process design and facilitation, funding, and sector experts.

Our diagnosis phase involved a mix of qualitative research, focusing on depth interviews, and a quant survey with key sector actors allowed us to take the pulse of the field and its appetite for a new vision. The insights enabled us to design a messaging house to help position To Zero, as well as to develop a brand and visual identity to build credibility around the endeavour. A website – to-zero.org – became the shop window for all this strategic and creative development.

A focal point for the To Zero process was the convening of a three-day workshop in London in autumn 2023. Here, around 40 global sector leaders came together to discuss the state of play and consider how a better future for children might be reached: one free of sexual violence. Claremont’s role was to synthesise these discussions and draw together a headline list of strategic priorities as a key step in delivering the vision for all.

The process is ongoing, and To Zero has pledged to iterate and adapt based on what it learns from participants over time. To enable this, an independent learning expert sits in the Implementation Team to track participants’ sentiments and feedback.

For Claremont, we’ve learned a lot about how to move towards agreed positioning from such a disparate group of stakeholders, who all have passionately-held positions on the nature and priorities of the sector and their identity within it, and the importance, when dealing with topics such as sexual violence, to have a truly trauma-informed process. We’ve learned the value of consent in developing the To Zero vision and priorities: conceding that participants in the process are unlikely to reach a complete consensus on every word, but that they consent to the outputs as a means to making progress.

Claremont has been a valued strategic partner in To Zero across the year. They played an important role not just in the groundwork interviews and quant survey that informed discussions at the visioning event, but also in the organisation and synthesis of the workshop itself, capturing emergent themes and priorities that will help shape a new sector vision.

– Sean Coughlan, To Zero Director