Module 11 - Community Matters

Allotments on church land Could your church set up a community allotment on land that the church owns? Or perhaps take on an allotment on a council owned site? These organisations may be able to help:

• FarmGarden, the Federation of City Farms and Community Gardens

• National Society of Allotments and Leisure Gardeners Limited

• Allotments UK

Could your church get a group together to help out regularly on a local nature reserve? Contact BTCV to find out where you could get involved. Perhaps you could help set up a green gym.

Try www.climate-speakers.org.uk which is a site set up by Climate Concern UK, a group of agencies working on climate change issues, and keen to get the message out there! 

Alternatively, get hold of the DVD of An Inconvenient Truth and have a showing, with discussion. For resources to give people, how about using Operation Noah resources? 

Campaign to Protect Rural England produced a report in June 2006 on the relationship between the growth of superstores and the difficulties experienced by local producers, and local food outlets. You can read about the report here or download the report from the link below.

The Church of England's Ethical Investment Advisory Group (EIAG) produced a report about the effect of the supermarkets on British farming livelihoods, called "Fairtrade begins at home". It was their submission to the Competition Commission who were looking into supermarket monopoly in November 2007.

Could you work together with your local Energy Saving (or Energy Efficiency) Advice Centre? Talk to your local centre: phone 0800 512 012 (this automatically puts you through to your local centre). They do home energy checks - questionnaires which then enable them to give accurate advice to homeowners about things they could do to make their homes more energy efficient. Could your church offer to run a workshop for local people on energy saving with your local centre?

Faithworks is a movement of thousands of individuals, churches and organisations motivated by their Christian faith to serve the needs of their local communities and positively influence society as a whole.  Could your church get involved? They may be able to help you set up a local project looking after the environment.

The Community Sustainable Energy Programme (CSEP) will be open to applications from April 2008 for community renewables or energy efficiency projects, including churches, where the outcomes are all to do with reducing carbon emissions.

Grants are available for capital funds for all sorts of renewable generation and energy efficiency projects (but only for energy efficiency measures where it is combined with a renewables project). Project development grants are also available.

For more details, see the CSEP website or contact CSEP by email

Many churches are engaging with Hope 2008 - an ecumenical programme to reach out to communities with the good news in word and action. Could you use environmental issues to engage and serve your local community? Doing a community clean-up? Taking responsibility for a local piece of land which has been ignored, and turning it into a wildlife haven for people to enjoy?

Living Streets is the campaigning group concerned to promote better streets and public spaces for people on foot. Could you link in with them in any way?

Based in Liverpool, Manchester, Preston & Burnley Faiths4Change offers free support to people of faith and other local residents to work together, supported by partners from all sectors. Turning their ideas into small scale environmental projects that transform neighbourhoods, building relationships and enabling individuals to gain or develop skills residents work in partnership.

Project Officers offer one to one support and advice to faith communities and responsive training to all members of the community. Training is delivered with partners and tailored to meet the needs of the community and the project that residents choose to embark on, often including project planning, practical planting or health and safety.  

Faiths4Change has a Development Fund which provides small grants to enable partnership projects to take place. Projects enable people to work together, gain skills and enhance their neighbourhoods socially, environmentally and economically.

Ultimately, Faiths4Change aims to enable residents to take an active role in shaping their communities for the better in England’s North West, building sustainable relationships and environments in diverse rich inner cities and towns.

Rural Communities Carbon Network has been set up by ruralnet|uk based in Warwickshire, to link together and resource rural communities who are wanting to set up Low Carbon Communities, or Carbon Zero Communties (such as Ashton Hayes, Chew Magna and other communities).

Could your church bring together the whole community to work on reducing its carbon emissions?

Could your church get involved in your local Transition Town initiative, or begin one?

A Transition Initiative is a community working together to look Peak Oil and Climate Change squarely in the eye and address this BIG question:

"for all those aspects of life that this community needs in order to sustain itself and thrive, how do we significantly increase resilience (to mitigate the effects of Peak Oil) and drastically reduce carbon emissions (to mitigate the effects of Climate Change)?"

The resulting coordinated range of projects across all these areas of life leads to a collectively designed energy descent pathway.

The community also recognises two crucial points:

• that we used immense amounts of creativity, ingenuity and adaptability on the way up the energy upslope, and that there's no reason for us not to do the same on the downslope
• if we collectively plan and act early enough there's every likelihood that we can create a way of living that's significantly more connected, more vibrant and more in touch with our environment than the oil-addicted treadmill that we find ourselves on today.

Transition Towns have produced a primer to help you get started in your area, if there isn't an initiative going already or people mulling it over.

Tools with a Mission and Tools for Self Reliance both collect unwanted tools and equipment to repair and refurbish, sending them out to many places around the world where there is need.

Could you persuade your local council to have a bin for unwanted tools at your local waste recycling plant?

Many  churches now are putting on green/eco fairs to allow local people to access information about a whole range of matters to do with climate change, sustainability, renewable energy, waste recycling and so on.

Stratford Methodist Church were part of a larger climate change group in Stratford who put on a big event in May 2008. Lim and Evelyn Ho wrote up their experience, and it could give you ideas as to what you might be able to organise with others in your area.

What is The Big Tidy Up? This September 2008 ENCAMS is launching The Big Tidy Up, its first national clean up campaign in 8 years.  The Big Tidy Up campaign will encourage communities to get together and clean up their local area.  The campaign is open to all, with groups, individuals and businesses working together to get their community clean.   

When will it launch? The campaign will launch on the 1st September 2008, with events linking in to World Clean Up weekend. Volunteers are encouraged to run their tidy up during September although tidy up’s can take place anytime throughout the year. 

How do volunteers register for The Big Tidy Up? The Big Tidy Up website will go ‘live’ in June ‘08 and will contain all the information needed for volunteers to run a safe and effective tidy up.  Volunteers can register online and once registered they will be sent a tidy up kit containing posters, stickers, tabard bibs and badges. The kit will also contain a brochure with guidance on how to carry out a safe tidy up.   

What happens next?Every registered group will be asked to return to the website and record how many bags of rubbish they have collected. This will appear on the site as a growing barometer, providing an overall national picture of how much rubbish has been cleared.  

Advertising During July and August 2008 a national advertising campaign will be appearing across the country, raising the profile of The Big Tidy Up brand and galvanising the public to join the campaign.  

Partnership Encams are working in partnership with Disney who have given them the rights to feature their character Wall:E, a lonely waste clearing robot, on our advertising. This is a new film due for release in the summer and will help us in our promotion to schools and uniformed groups.  

Encams are looking to generate as wide a network of people taking part in the Big Tidy Up as possible. From football clubs and international organisations to community groups and committed individuals, Encams are working  to put pride back into our country and have a great big Tidy Up.

Further Information
To find out more about the Big Tidy Up, contact the Marketing team on 01942 612621 or look at the website, launched in mid-June 2008: www.thebigtidyup.org

More news from Encams about the Big Tidy Up.

Do you have folk in your congregation who could take on the fairtrade challenge to convert their workplaces to fairtrade? One useful contact would be FairtradeVending who offer vending machines with 100% fairtrade ingredients.

Could your church get people together to begin a community supported agricultural project? This is where the local community is actively involved in food production. For example, have a look at www.stroudcommunityagriculture.org

On their website, you can read how they set up two local community agriculture projects 500kb .pdf - fascinating reading! They started off with renting 1 acre of land and employing a vegetable grower one day per week. Now  (June 2008) there are 2 projects in Stroud with one of them renting 50 acres of land, providing vegetables for 189 families and employing 2 full time farmers/growers, alongside two part-time admin people (also using volunteers who contribute about 10% of the work on the farm). And alongside this there is another scheme locally which rents 3 acres of land, employs one grower and supplies 78 members with vegetables.

Read more about Community Supported Agriculture on the Soil Association website. The Soil Association has just begun a new project to develop CSAs and organic buying groups. There is lots of information on their site about how to make food projects work.

Other sites include:

• www.makinglocalfoodwork.co.uk
• www.localfoodgrants.org -  new grants available for local food schemes (from March 2008 - 2014

Do you run a lunch club or cafe in your church? Have you thought about sourcing local food for your enterprise? It makes sense to make links, but how do you start? Try the Local Food Works website for a number of helpful information sections with lots of information on local food, including how to source local food

CSV Environment is part of the national Community Service Volunteers charity and offers a range of environmental services to organisations, groups and individuals, for example:

• Run A MUCK Community Composting
• Street Champions - helping residents to report problems and take action to enhance their street and local area
• Out to Play, which works with schools and play organisations to make the most of the potential for play in outdoor spaces
• provide advice and best practice guides
• help communities to make a difference through local projects.

CSV Environment involves people with little or no environmental experience in improving the areas where they live and work. They tackle social exclusion and envoruage a ctive citizenship by providing opportunities for people of all ages and background to volunteer. They create awareness of practical steps that local people can take to bring about change, and support them in finding long-term, sustainable solutions for their local environment.

Currently based in Birmingham and Bristol, they are wanting to spread this good practice nationally, so do get in touch wherever you are, as they will be able to help and advise, even at a distance:

CSV Environment: Birmingham office - 0121 322 2025

CSV Environment: Bristol office - 0117 964 0114

Making local food work is an initiative designed to help people get hold of local food, either as an inidividual consumer, or as a producer or in setting up local food initiatives in their neighbourhood or village.

There are lots of structures available to help community groups to become involved, and these are listed on the website. This could be a great way to get your church actively involved in helping build links with the local farming community, or simply providing a valuable service to people. You might think about setting up a community supported agriculture scheme (getting people actively involved in a direct relationship with a producer), or how about setting up a food co-op or buying group so that people on low incomes have direct access to fresh, local fruit and veg? Or could you run a Farmers' Market from your church? Many do!

FellowTravellers is an initiative set up in February 2009 to try and link together people who need a public transport link, but who don't have it, with people who can offer to provide (anyone with a PSV licence, local authority private hire or taxi licence, or section 22 permits and a suitable vehicle can offer a route through Fellowtravellers.

From the website:

"To help providers to plan and develop routes, any member of the public can suggest a route they would like to see delivered.

To help providers assess potential routes, they can post prospective routes on site and gain valuable customer feedback and expressions of interest before fully committing themselves to delivery.

Providers can post routes which they intend to deliver as regular daily services, or for one day only (perhaps filling the empty leg of an existing booking).

The service will be inexpensive because longer contracts and multiple passengers will enable providers to keep costs down; it will be safe because all fellow passengers will be registered Fellowtravellers' users; and it will be reliable because local competition will motivate providers to deliver the best service at the keenest price. "

Operation Noah launches its Church Action Starter Pack for communities wanting to LEARN and TAKE ACTION on climate change.

In the run-up to the monumentally important Copenhagen climate change negotiations, it’s imperative that as many churches as possible mobilise and engage on climate change issues and recognise the important role they can play as community leaders on this issue. 

To this end, Operation Noah has produced this pack of resources to accompany its ARK campaign.  There are resources suitable for all the different sectors of the church community, including the workbook Between the Flood and the Rainbow, the DVD God is Green, liturgical resources and specific ARK campaign actions people can take, such as the celebrated origami ARK petition, the ARK building competition and instructions on how to organise an event.  

Packs cost £20 and can be purchased by contacting Operation Noah (email, 020 7324 4761, Operation Noah, 28 Charles Square, London, N1 6HT).  Payment can be made by Paypal  or by cheque (made payable to Operation Noah).

For more details, please visit the Operation Noah site. 

Abundance is a wonderfully innovative scheme based in Sheffield to harvest fruit from publicly accessible fruit trees around the town. They are then distributed fresh or processed into preserves, juices and other products for use by local people who would not otherwise have access to such nutritious food. This beautiful donwloadable booklet is truly inspirational and full of ideas that could be used by churches

Bob Hopkins, founder of the Transition Movement, gave a talk at a conference in June 2011, which has now been put on the Transition Culture web site, along with the accompanying slides. It can be found at http://transitionculture.org/2011/07/21/my-talk-at-the-resolve-conferenc..., and is a summary of what has been happening to date. It should be of interest to both those wanting to find out about the Movement and also to those already involved and looking for ideas. The talk itself is about 30 minutes so make yourself a cup of something, sit down and enjoy.