Skills &
wellbeing
Reliable, accessible programming that builds practical skills and supports physical and mental wellbeing.
Cause-related agency
We deliver
the S
in ESG.
Forward Motion designs and delivers the community engagement, placemaking and cause partnerships that turn a social commitment into something real people can see and take part in.
Community work
Four interlocking pillars.
Work that builds skills, reaches beyond the room, makes culture a shared resource and makes the result count.
Skills &
Outreach &
partnerships
Programmes brought into schools, care homes and community centres, alongside the partners already doing the work.
Culture as
inclusion
Events and cultural activity made with the community, not simply for it.
Assessment,
monitoring &
reporting
We assess the gap before delivery, then track participation, partners and outcomes as the work happens.
Delivery data
Work that
adds up.
Seven years inside one developer's portfolio. Four years of recorded social delivery, with participation, partners and outcomes captured as the work happens.
community participants
recorded last year
community activities
in 2025
skills development
sessions in 2025
outreach activities
in 2025
partner organisations
in 2025
young people reached by
NO+ Phases 1 & 2
NO+ awareness sessions
rated NO+ sessions useful
want future NO+ sessions
01
The position
The S in ESG is usually the least developed.
Most organisations can point to their environmental targets and their governance structure with confidence. The social pillar is where things tend to get vaguer: a paragraph in a report, a one off sponsored event, a donation mentioned once and never followed up on.
That gap is what we work in. We build the relationships, partnerships and ongoing programmes that turn a social commitment from a line in a report into something that actually happens, with people who can feel the difference. It is slower than a press release, and that is exactly why it holds up when someone looks closely.
The environmental pillar has engineers. The governance pillar has lawyers. The social pillar, too often, has a paragraph.
02
Who this is for
You have made the commitment.Now it has to happen.
Most organisations that come to this work are in the same position: a social value commitment already exists, in a bid, an ESG report, a planning condition or an investor deck, and there is not yet anything behind it.
04ways a commitment commonly arrives: bid, report, planning condition or investor deck.
The pressure to close that gap is no longer optional. CSRD and double materiality assessments now require organisations touching EU capital to evidence social impact, not just describe intent. Social value carries real weighting in UK public procurement. Developers face planning obligations and communities that remember what was promised. Asset managers and financial institutions answer to investors who have learned to ask what the S actually consists of.
We work with organisations across these situations: developers, corporate brands with a social value pledge, asset managers reporting against ESG frameworks, local authorities running civic or regeneration programmes, cultural institutions building genuine relationships with the audiences around them. The discipline is the same in each: design a community engagement strategy, deliver it, and record what happened well enough that it stands up in social impact reporting, procurement responses and board review. A commitment on paper is a liability. A commitment delivered is an asset.
03
What we do
Community engagement, placemaking and partnership.
This is the practical work behind that approach. It is built around the organisation and the place, not a template we repeat.
Community engagement
Ongoing, neighbourhood or stakeholder facing work, built around the people and organisations already active in a place or sector, given its own honest voice rather than folded into corporate messaging.
Placemaking
Cultural activity, events and civic programming aimed at making somewhere, or something, worth people's time, independent of any commercial transaction attached to it.
Cause partnerships
Longer term relationships with organisations doing real social work, structured so the partnership is genuinely useful to them, not just a name attached to someone else's activity.
Impact reporting and evidence
Everything we deliver is recorded as it happens: participation, partnerships, outcomes. The result is social impact evidence you can put in front of a regulator, an investor or a board, built from delivery rather than assembled after the fact. For many clients this is the part they were missing most.
Programmes create the impact.Evidence makes it count.
04
Where this comes from
Proved where the social pillar is hardest to fake.
We built this discipline inside real estate, working for seven years across the Portuguese portfolio of REIS, a developer operating in Portugal and Switzerland, alongside work for one further external developer. Property is an unforgiving place to learn this work: the community is physically present, the commitments are attached to planning consent, and a programme that exists only on paper is visible to everyone who lives next to the site.
The practice behind Forward Motion is older than the agency: our founder has led the Non-Violence Project in the United Kingdom since 1996. The problem we solve is not specific to property, and the discipline transfers. What changes by sector is the framework you report against and the stakeholders you answer to. What does not change is the requirement to design a programme and then actually deliver it, year after year.
05
In practice
Where the commitment becomes visible.
Programmes, live culture, conversation and public symbols give the work a life beyond the report, built for sustained delivery rather than a single sponsored moment.
SOMARMarvila
A community programme with its own voice.
Rooted in Marvila, Lisbon, and delivered with local partners through workshops, skills training and neighbourhood events.
NO+ ProjectLisbon
Healthy relationships make happier communities.
NO+ is a domestic violence prevention initiative for young people, helping them understand the dynamics of healthy relationships.
Non-Violence LiveLondon
Culture carries the message further.
A high-production studio show and podcast built around live music, performance, interviews and conversation. Thirteen episodes have already been filmed.
Knot ViolenceLondon + Lisbon
A public symbol of choosing non-violence.
Created as a tribute to John Lennon, the bronze gun with its barrel tied in a knot is the Non-Violence Project’s worldwide emblem. The Gun Parade carries that message into public space.
06
How we work with you
From a free diagnosis to a delivered programme.
Most enquiries do not start with a fully formed brief. They start with a commitment and a gap. So we work in four steps, and you can stop at any of them. The first is free, and there is no obligation to take the next.
S Review
A structured diagnosis of the gap between what your organisation has committed to and what is actually being delivered, wherever those commitments sit, in reports, bids, planning conditions or pledges. You leave with a short written summary you can use internally, whether or not we ever work together.
Social Delivery Blueprint
If the S Review shows there is real work to do, the Blueprint is where it gets designed. We map your commitments, stakeholders and potential partners, then set out the programmes, the evidence you will need, the budgets and a twelve month plan. It is a standalone deliverable. You own it, and you are free to deliver it yourself or with anyone you choose.
Social Programme Partner
Where you want us to deliver rather than just plan, we take on the programme itself: designing it, managing the partners, and running it on the ground, year on year. This is the core of what we do, and it is where a commitment stops being a document and becomes something people take part in.
Social Evidence Office
The reporting layer. We capture participation, outcomes, partnerships and evidence as the work happens, and turn it into the material you need for board, investor, planning and procurement reporting. It can run alongside a programme we deliver, or over programmes you already run yourself.
What happens after the S Review
There is no pressure to continue. If there is a clear case for the Blueprint, we will say so and price it there and then. If there is not, we will tell you that too. Most clients who go on to a retained mandate reach it through the Blueprint first, because it is the cheapest way for both sides to find out whether the work, and the working relationship, is right.
Book an S review07
Where we work
Built between Lisbon and London, working where the commitment sits.
Our community programmes are rooted in Lisbon and delivered on the ground through local partner organisations. Non-Violence Live is produced with Studio Eight in London. The planning, evidence and reporting work travels across Portugal and the United Kingdom, wherever social value needs to move from a promise into practice.
08
Leadership team
Leadership that stays close to the work.
Forward Motion is led by a small senior team with direct responsibility for strategy, partnerships and delivery. Clem and Melanie remain closely involved from the first S Review through to the work on the ground, supported by a trusted network of programme, production and reporting specialists brought together around each brief.
Photograph forthcoming
Founder
Clem Leech
Clem leads Forward Motion's client work end to end, conducting every S Review, authoring each Social Delivery Blueprint and directing engagements through to delivery. He has led the Non-Violence Project in the United Kingdom since 1996 and spent the past seven years embedding community and social value programmes across the REIS development portfolio, giving Forward Motion three decades of cause delivery experience and a rare fluency in both community practice and commercial real estate.
Photograph forthcoming
Head of Community
Melanie Briffa
Melanie directs Forward Motion's community programmes across Marvila, Cascais and Oeiras, including the SOMAR programme and its partner network spanning CAIS, Kolbe, UMAR and the neighbourhood organisations of eastern Lisbon. She is responsible for programme design, partner relationships and on the ground delivery, and in 2025 oversaw 67 community activities reaching more than 2,000 participants.
09
Community studios
Spaces that give people a reason to gather.
With Studio Eight, we build and programme community studios in London and Lisbon: working places where the programmes on this page are actually made.
London
Studio Eight at Bounds Green is a production and development space. Non-Violence Live was filmed here, thirteen episodes of it, alongside live sessions, workshops and new formats in development. The studio is also available for community and creative hire, so the space earns its keep between productions.
Lisbon
The Lisbon studio anchors our community programming on the ground: SOMAR workshops and skills sessions, partner meetings, and public conversations such as the Women Shaping Cities panel. It is shaped around the people who use it, and most weeks it is them, not us, setting the agenda.
10
Contact
If you have a social commitment that needs delivering, we would like to hear about it.
We work with a limited number of clients at a time, because this kind of work does not scale by cutting corners. Tell us about your organisation, what you have already committed to, and what has not yet happened. We will tell you honestly whether we are the right people to help, and what that could look like.