All posts tagged as community

Transition Town Totnes

With just a few days to go before the deadline for entering the Big Green Challenge, here’s an inspiring story of how one town is preparing for a low-carbon future.

Transition Town Totnes is part of the Transition Network – communities that are working together to create a local timetable for reducing carbon emissions and dependence on oil. Through a range of working groups, Transition Town Totnes organises energy reduction projects that are fun, engaging and inspiring for all members of the community.

Projects in Totnes have included running renewable energy workshop, installing 50 rooftop solar water heaters and hosting an art exhibition with an environmental theme. Another initiative is the Totnes Pound, a local currency system that aims to encourage local trade and strengthen the local economy by keeping money circulating in the community.

The original Transition Town was Kinsale in Ireland and the initiative has now spread as far as Australia and New Zealand. You can find out about all of the towns involved at the Transition Towns Wiki.

If you’re interested in starting up a transition intiative in your town then check out the Transition Network conference which takes place in Cirencester from 11-13 April 2008.

Edinburgh Community Backgreens Association

Here’s a great example of a community working together to reduce carbon emissions and build a strong sense of neighbourhood and community spirit.

Since 2006, Edinburgh Community Backgreens Association has been working with households to turn neglected tenement backgreens into shared community green spaces. It’s established seven sites in Edinburgh, and the engagement and participation of local residents is central to the success of the community backgreens model.

Residents volunteer their time at monthly workshops to clear the rubbish and overgrowth and lay out the new community greens. A Green Caretaker – usually a tenement resident – is appointed for each backgreen, to oversee its development and provide a regular maintenance service.

The community backgreens provide a focus for community activity and facilitate the environmental sustainability of the tenement buildings. As well as space to grow plants, fruit and vegetables, the backgreens include play and relaxation areas, community composting and bike sheds.

You’ve got one week left before the deadline for entering the Big Green Challenge, so if you’ve been thinking about putting an application together with members of your local community, then get going today!

How do you define community?

The Big Green Challenge is about people working together to turn ideas into action within communities. But what do we mean by communities?

The place where you live is often the first thing that springs to mind when you hear the word ‘community’. Many people feel connected to their local community and this can apply on different scales. Smaller communities could be formed by a single street, an area of a town or a group of villages, and larger ones could cover a town, neighbouring towns or a city.

The local interpretation is just one of many kinds of community. Communities can be based around networks of friendship, culture, faith, ethnicity or political commitment. Work colleagues, hobbies or interests can also have communities built around them. Some of these communities might be connected to a local area, but they can extend across large areas too.

Lots of people are members of communities that are based online and these groupings might include people from all over the UK and from other countries too.

These are just some ideas about how communities can be defined - it’s up to each Big Green Challenge entrant to define their community and we expect to see lots of different interpretations. If you have any questions about the application criteria for the Big Green Challenge, then take a look at the rules and our FAQs.

A mountain of unused ideas

Vicki’s post earlier today mentioned that 80 per cent of people think they’ve had an idea that would change people’s lives for the better, but few people take their idea any further - creating a ‘mountain of unused ideas’.

Our survey also showed that four fifths of those questioned believe that ordinary people can make a big difference to serious problems like climate change. Who knows what we could achieve if these untapped ideas were brought to the surface?

The factors that stop people from following through with their idea include lack of money, not having enough confidence, a fear of failure, or simply not knowing where to start. Have any of these been obstacles to making your ideas happen?

More than half of the people we surveyed said they’d be motivated to act on their ideas if financial backing or reward was available, while being able to change people’s lives and help the local community were seen as the most important end results of having good ideas. People at our regional events said that the Big Green Challenge prize fund was a great way to focus people’s attention.

Why not get together with your group, dig out your thinking caps, switch off any negative thoughts about your creativity and make an idea happen!

A New Year’s resolution

I’ve just joined the Big Green Challenge team and will be posting here over the next couple of months, hopefully providing some inspiration so that lots of groups of people put their thinking caps on and enter the competition!

Over Christmas and New Year I’ve been thinking about what community means, in particular the local definition of community, in the sense of where you live and the people around you. Most of the communities I belong to are based online and don’t have a local aspect – the exception being Freecycle which is a great example of how an online group can make a real difference at a local level.

I’d like to make more of a contribution to my neighbourhood, and my New Year’s resolution is to get together with other people to help make my community a greener and happier place to be. I also have a fledgling idea about setting up a group where people can get together to talk about their ideas, since talking about ideas is the first step to making them happen!

It’d be great to hear about how other people have gone about getting more involved in their local community, so please leave a comment if you’ve got any experiences or tips to share.

Why don’t you… ask your community?

We’ve targeted the Big Green Challenge at communities. Why? Well, there are plenty of schemes trying to get people to do good things such as getting homeowners to put in roof insulation or use low energy lightbulbs.

But one of the big things experts talk about but nobody knows how to make happen is to get people to change their behaviour. If more children walked to school, then there would be fewer car journeys so less road congestion and healthier children. And there are plenty of similar examples.

You can have “Walk to School weeks” and introduce parking restrictions or congestion charges. But are there more effective ways of discouraging people from driving their kids to school?

One way to find out is to ask communities for their ideas. Don’t tell them what to do but ask them to come up with good ideas and then test the best of these. They can be about anything – as long as it reduces the carbon dioxide emitted. That’s the thinking behind the Big Green Challenge.

Top tips and plastic bags

George Marshall of COIN wrote a provocative piece about whether re-using plastic bags and other small actions are helpful when it comes to doing something meaningful about climate change.

See Guardian and his blog.

Now he is right to point out that re-using bags has a very small effect on overall carbon use. He acknowledges that there may be other benefits – a few turtles won’t die as a result of confusing plastic bags in the sea for jellyfish.

So can we consign the idea of re-using bags and similar “simple tips” to the recycling bin? And chastise the Government and anyone else who promote them for diverting us from the serious business of responding effectively to climate change.

Or is there more to it? Several bloggers have pointed out that by encouraging people to start with simple actions you may them to move on to more demanding ones once they’ve realised what’s at stake and have a better understanding of what’s actually required.

What strikes me about plastic bags is that when we re-use bags today, it’s the big supermarket chains that make most the savings. We do the work, and the supermarkets reap the benefit. So there’s an imbalance there. Especially if you know that £100m or so is spent each year on these bags.

So my version of re-using bags is to have local communities strike a bargain with supermarkets. If the community re-uses bags, then the community gets some of the money that’s saved. For example, if students in a school pester their parents to re-use bags and the school gets funding for energy efficiency measures or renewable energy technologies etc. If you can save 20% of bag use, then this could be £20m a year!

But there’s more. One great advantage is that people immediately see the point; you take resources – the bags - that would literally go in a hole in the ground and turn them in to something useful – renewable energy installations or whatever. This is a very powerful message about how we confront climate change – we have to use resources much more efficiently. Only that way we have a high standard of living but with lower carbon use.

And more …. If we had a branded “Green Bag” then this would be advertising for the campaign on every high street in the country. The campaign snowballs.