The Centre for Sustainable Energy partnered with Forest of Dean District Council to work with community-based organisations, supporting them to develop sustainability action plans. This work was funded by the Thirty Percy Foundation.

Bringing together participating organisations, the project began with an interactive and practical climate action workshop covering:

• An introduction to climate change and its impacts.
• Mapping out emissions from buildings and operations.
• Engaging stakeholders and the local community.
• Inspiring examples and practical tools.
• Creating an action plan: best practice guidance and templates.

Tailored support to develop climate action plans

CSE then worked with the organisations on a one-to-one basis, providing bespoke support to help with the development and implementation of a climate action plan.

The project finished with a final group meeting for everyone to share their action plans, work together on addressing any ongoing challenges and celebrate achievements. 

This project has created a network of community organisation who are empowered to create positive change in their organisations and local community.

Climate plans in action

Below are examples of different organisation’s action plans and key focuses. Each has three main aims to make meaningful changes bespoke to their communities.

Artspace

Artspace is an arts and education based charity. Established in 1988, the organisation specialises in offering fully inclusive, accessible creative opportunities for people of any age or ability. Based in Cinderford, they offer courses and workshops on topics such as painting, animation and circus skills.

The top three actions to highlight from their climate action plan:

• Procurement
  Setting up a sharing system for tutors to reuse materials that otherwise may be wasted, which also saves money. Artspace are also changing suppliers of office materials and furniture to local suppliers and refurbished options. By changing their paper supplier from Amazon to a local company, this delivered a cost saving.
• Transport
  Collecting car mileage from all the tutors to get baseline emissions and then look into ways of reducing this through car sharing and location of sessions.
• Engaging staff
  Working with the Trustees and Board to get their input and gather priorities for the action plan based on an initial list of ideas generated in this project.

A spokesperson from Artspace said: “Without this project with CSE, we’d have probably just dug up an action plan from a previous format, and just kept filling it in without being more critical about what we have in place. It’s helped improve the system we use for climate action planning, given it a greater sense of purpose and is now something we are actively wanting to do as an organisation.”

North and West Gloucestershire Citizens Advice

North and West Gloucestershire Citizens Advice cover the Forest of Dean and provide practical advice to anyone who needs it.

They developed their action plan in a collaborative way, hosting all staff meetings to share ideas and challenges. They reflected:

“It’s been quite a unifying process that everyone in the organisation has gone through because we involved staff in the process of making an action plan. We were able to say to them ‘what do you want this to look like’ and get their ideas which has made the plan stronger. We didn’t just tell them this is something that have to do – by giving them a say in the process, this has been really unifying and empowering.

The top three actions to highlight from their climate action plan:

1. Working on energy and resource use in the office
   Switching to a renewable supplier, putting up signs about energy use behaviour changes for staff (e.g. boiling only water you need), and reducing the digital footprint of file storage by deleting unnecessary and duplicate files. A quick win included reducing the size of a form all clients complete to one page reducing their paper consumption by 50% over a year.
2. Reducing transport impact
   Start tracking how far staff and clients are travelling to work and drop-in sessions to get baseline data on this. Getting staff to car share when travelling to meetings across the district and promote more local drop-ins so clients don’t have to travel far but aren’t compromising on their in-person sessions
3. Influencing and engaging
   Sharing the action plan with National Citizens Advice to help inspire other Citizens Advice offices to make their own plan. Greening the advice they give, such as telling clients about reselling sites and getting money back on tech recycling.

“Without a project like this we wouldn’t have made our climate action plan because you just keep going from day-to-day to without thinking,” said a Citizens Advice manager. “If you don’t start planning for the future, then it will be the future. Some actions feel scary but putting them down means you can slowly and steadily start working on them.”

Forest Voluntary Action Forum

FVAF is the Voluntary Service Council and Volunteer Centre for the Forest of Dean. They provide assistance to voluntary and community organisations in the district.

The top three actions to highlight from their climate action plan:

• Improving the energy efficiency of the building
  Installing LED lightbulbs and timers on the taps. With CSE’s support, finding funding for measures such as insulation and solar panels.
• Embedding sustainability into the design and running of a new café space
  This includes sourcing the food locally, buying refurbished kitchen goods, and creating a thriving outdoor space with wildflowers, a community garden and opportunities for local people to volunteer.
• Engaging the local community
  Using an engagement vehicle during summer months, getting out and about to start conversations about climate change and get local people’s input into plans using tools like the Place standard circle.

A FVAF worker said: “This project has made us more knowledgeable. It will help us implement sustainability from the get-go as our new cafe space is built, rather than doing reactive work later down the line, and that’s been really helpful. It’s also helped us understand which questions to ask when we’re talking to contractors, to make sure any environmental benefit is taken into account and designed into the project”.