Oxfordshire Climate Change Communities Competition- SYNOPSIS of all the entries

 

Barracks Lane community garden, Oxford

Your ideas Following our popular programme last year, (we had over 2000 visitors in the first 6 months of opening), we are planning to run practical family friendly workshops and events through the spring and summer. Workshops will have an environmental theme such as waste reduction, growing your own food etc. We have no staff and are dependent on volunteers and fundraising. A grant of £500 would enable us to add one additional workshop to our programme (so far we have funding for 12) .  Ideas for workshops include composting, food waste management, growing and cooking your own food and introduction to permaculture. The funding would also help us to improve our information. It would help fund a notice board about what is happening locally in relation to climate change action. For further information about what we do and what we plan to do funding permitting see: http://hometown.aol.co.uk/johnbaps/welcome.html photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/barrackslanegarden/ http://www.bbc.co.uk/breathingplaces/yourprojects/barracks_lane.shtml

 

Health & Harmony Centre Kidlington

Your ideas Hold a weekly or bi-monthly breakfast/dinner group for the environmentally active, intellectually curious and spiritually conscious. Each meeting will either have a DVD presentation or live cutting-edge speaker whose topics range from scientific and technological breakthroughs, global and local issues to success strategies, psychology, spiritual awareness, and the arts. Our goal is to focus on positive solutions to our extraordinary global challenges that call for more than technological solutions.  There is an urgent call for a new depth of vision and contribution from all global communities. We will encourage and inspire each other's potential with passion.  We will address our collective problems by harvesting the best resources of all systems of knowledge-technological, scientific, practical and spiritual -while recognizing that no one perspective contains all the truth for all cultures, times and conditions.  We will share our resources and findings with other global climate control/energy groups.

 

Bicester and District Chamber of Commerce

Your ideas - Meeting to promote the commercial opportunities from climate change to local business community, with a Q&A session with a panel including WRAP and Environwise. (March) Prior to this speaker from WRAP at the Bicester Bicester Business Breakfast Club (Feb)

 

Brightwell cum Sotwell Environment Group - WINNER! At the Group's behest, SODC purchased a thermal imaging camera and has loaned it to the Group for its thermal imaging project (TIP). Five members of TIP were trained to use the camera and are now in the Pilot Phase of TIP, collecting thermal images of 20 contrasting houses in the village. These will show where heat is escaping and where remedial measures are needed. After displays of these results in the Village Hall, St Agathas Church and the Red Lion, in Phase 1 TIP will be extended to the other houses whose owners choose to have their properties surveyed. They will be given the resulting infra red pictures and a leaflet provided by TVEC listing where they can get help to improve thermal efficiency, grants etc. Phase 2 will be carried out next winter on those properties where work has been undertaken to check that efficiency has improved.

 

Sustainable Charlbury (SusCha) - WINNER! We have been working with people in Charlbury to raise awareness of Climate Change and encourage personal action. We have set up an eco book-section in the library, begun work on a market garden, held a green poetry and music night and are holding a series of film-screenings. Our next project is to help raise awareness of home energy use and encourage energy saving measures in the home. We intend to do this through creating ‘sample energy reduction strategies' on several homes of different sizes in Charlbury. We will thermally image homes, work with local builders to find out costs of eco-renovation, provide information about products, services and grants available locally, and put our findings in an understandable format, providing potential energy and money savings. The information will be available on our website and will act as a useable guide for anyone in Charlbury wanting to reduce their household emissions.

 

Drayton GreenCred

  

Develop a GreenCred Web site.  GreenCred is a community or street level carbon footprinting scheme where different stickers are awarded by the school energy team depending on the Green Credits being achieved by households in the village. The school has already distributed a pilot GreenCred questionnaire, analysed the 50 replies, awarded the appropriate level of GreenCred window stickers appropriate to the level of Green Credits being achieved together with an updated questionnaire.  The system would work much more efficiently if the questionnaire could be put on a web site.  This would also enable other communities to adopt a similar scheme and share experiences.   The sticker would be a badge of honour and green credibility could become competitive.

 

Dorchester Carbon Project - Living Lightly In Dorchester   The aim of the Dorchester Carbon Project is to dramatically reduce the emission of greenhouse gases caused by the residents of the parish. We intend to achieve this by a variety of measures including but not limited to public education, re-use and recycling initiatives, capital energy efficiency and clean energy generation projects, the lobbying of local government and the targeting of school pupils and other community groups to influence residents' behaviour. We already have a number of active projects. We would like a dedicated noticeboard in the village •§         to inform people of our activities and other local events promoting environmental awareness (e.g. Northmoor Trust, Sustainable Wallingford, COIN); •§         to provide contact details and recruit new members and volunteers; •§         to be a self-advertising awareness-raiser. The noticeboard will be placed on the Village Hall, in the centre of the village. We have a draft design by a local craftsman.

Grandpont Energy and Climate Change Optimists GECCO  Oxford

WINNER!

Reduce energy use in Grandpont.

Our plan is to impact upon all the residents of Grandpont and to measure the relative percentages of willing, unwilling and unaware people in the area and to convert as many as possible to the willing group in order to reduce the energy consumption of the whole.

GECCO is at a beginning and would use £500 to communicate within Grandpont using one willing contact per street to observe and communicate with their street by leaflet, email, poster, phone, and face to face.

We will have public meetings every two months, usually with an outside speaker, and other meetings in our homes more frequently and on topics of interest to subgroups.

 

Frontiers- Adventures in Learning - based at Hill End   Develop an eco-friendly outdoor classroom.  A place where young people can learn how to reduce their carbon emissions by growing their own food in a polytunnel or outside and by experimenting with renewable energy systems and non-fossil fuel energy sources. Frontiers works with teenagers from several different schools, we also plan to work in an orphanage in Bulgaria in May this year.  In the long term I hope that the skills we acquire can be taken back into local schools and that the physical space we create can be replicated within school grounds.   March 2008- install irrigation system in our polytunnel April- Build a wood powered earth oven for cooking and heating up water. Make some flat plate solar collectors for heating water. May- Travel to Bulgaria and share these skills with children currently living in Rada Kirkovic orphanage June onwards continue to develop our areas at Hill End

 

Health &Harmony Centre Kidlington   ONE MINUTE EACH NIGHT - in WW II, there was an advisor to Churchill who organized a group of people every night at a prescribed hour for one minute to collectively pray for the safety of England, its people and peace. This had an amazing effect as bombing stopped. Our group is organizing the same thing every night at 8:00pm.Wherever we are we stop whatever we are doing and spend one minute praying that we "take care of creation."  That we may reach across the boundaries of belief, ethnicity and nationality to tap the sacred source that unites us all. Also that we imagine and treat as sacred the interconnectedness of all living beings to each other and to our beloved planet. We re-learn how to build relationships, families and communities that foster complete human development in every domain of life on our planet earth.

 

Sustainable Kirtlington - WINNER!   Organise a village fête with the theme of sustainability: a ‘Footprint Fair', with black footprints of varying sizes stuck down on the sports field where the fête would be held (they might lead to some kind of treasure ...) There would be the usual stalls and games, but we would try to introduce the idea of sustainability into them in as humorous a way as possible. The aim is to inform and entertain - not to preach or bully! We would like to have ‘green' transport: pony rides and something powered by a bicycle which people would pay to pedal...

 

Low Carbon West Oxford   We want to build a micro hydro on Osney Weir to generate renewable electricity for the community. The electricity will be sold to the Environmental Agency and the money channelled into local community climate change projects. The Environmental Agency have said that the weir can be located on their land and can be installed during their future maintenance work . The time frame for implementation means that we need to raise £6,000 for a feasibility study in the next 6 months. (See below). This application forms part of our wider fundraising plan. The micro hydro project forms part of a wider initiative called Low Carbon West Oxford which was recently established by local residents to reduce our carbon footprint, both individually and as a community. So far local groups have been formed to work on renewable energy, traffic reduction, food issues, waste reduction, and an eco-library to share energy efficient devices.  We are also recruiting voluntary street representatives to provide information and support to local residents interested in taking action.

 

West Oxford Community Association with West Oxford Primary School   To take the opportunity of a ‘captive audience' of motorists and others entering Oxford by way of the Botley Road and to display a changing selection of banners and posters highlighting aspects of climate change and promoting positive change. This could range from a comment on the day's temperature, to a statement about air pollution; to ‘positive action you can take to save the planet/save energy/reduce pollution; to drawing attention to the effects of congestion; to personal statements and drawings by young people about climate change. The posters/banners will carry slogans and arresting phrases and images. A simultaneous display will be mounted in the West Oxford Community Centre itself and publicised.

 

Longworth Local Environmental Network (LEN)   Develop a newly formed voluntary community group (officers elected) to encourage better environmental and climate change awareness  and improve energy conservation, recycling etc. The whole population of neighbouring villages of Longworth and Hinton Waldrist - c.350 households.

 

Low Carbon Wolvercote, Oxford - WINNER! Hold an expo on renewable energy and energy efficiency in Wolvercote in May

Low Carbon Wolvercote    Attend a course on Solar Hot Water heating with Low Impact Living Initiative, then work with local community from young to old to pass on the skills learnt

 

Low Carbon Wolvercote    There are about 30 unused fleeces from sheep kept at the Wolvercote Community Farm stored in a barn. I would like to set up a workshop at the village hall demonstrating spinning, various types of weaving, knitting, crochet and felting using these fleeces. The workshop would be open to anyone either to drop in and see demonstrations or to stay and learn a skill by make an article of clothing. Various people in Wolvercote are already expert in some of these skills and they would be invited to come with their equipment and demonstrate. We have a Low Carbon Wolvercote craft group and these people would be involved. The workshop would make use of fleeces that no one knows what to do with; impart useful skills to people in an interesting, fun way; draw attention to the fact that we no longer use much wool in this country and what we do use we import from eg. New Zealand; and reintroduce the idea that wool is very useful to keep us warm.

 

Low Carbon Wolvercote Hold a lottery for one household to win a  HIPS-style energy-efficiency assessment  of their house, but also giving recommendations and ideas for improving insulation, using renewable energy sources, etc., with an idea of costings. This would be publicised through the village, with tickets sold at the Wolvercote Farmers' Market and local events, culminating with the Low Carbon Wolvercote renewables/energy exhibition in Wolvercote Village Hall on 10 May. The lottery could be drawn here.        The aim is not only to get individuals to think about energy efficiency in their houses, but for Low Carbon Wolvercote also to build up expertise in advising on what can be done with the existing housing stock.

 

CHOICES, Didcot    Offer a series of ongoing talks and workshops: •·        on climate change, and the environmental impacts of communities, signposting activities that work for other communities; •·        helping people to consider the links between our individual and communal wellbeing, the way we live and our interaction with nature.   CHOICES talks and workshops are open to all members of the community. In addition, as Secretary to Didcot District Scouting Association, I would explore the opportunities for offering talks/ workshops specifically for Scout Groups