The Great Collaboration Toolkit captures information about the carbon reduction actions that individuals, businesses, community groups and schools in your local community have taken, want to take, and are unable to take.
The captured information – completely anonymised – is summarised into a Local Council Report that can be presented at a council meeting. The insights given in the report enable you to see what is happening in your local community and this valuable information can be used to inform your own Carbon Action Plan.
For example, you might find that 40% of people have swapped their energy provider to renewable energy. In which case there is still a large proportion of the community that will require help to do so.
A community ‘Switching Day’ could be organised to give residents access to laptops to view impartial energy comparison sites.
Or, you might find that 5% of people already have an electric car. However, another 10% would get one if there were local charging points. That might lead you to research grants for public charging points for example and get some installed.
With over 60 actions within the Toolkit, you can imagine that there will be many interesting findings when you compile your own Carbon Action Plan.
How does a local council get started with the Toolkit?
Even if a local council does nothing, their residents and businesses can use the Toolkit. However, the information that comes out of the Toolkit becomes more powerful the more people that are using it.
So councils will want to embed use of the Toolkit into their carbon reduction decision making, and promote its use within their community.
To be most successful, a council needs to consider four pieces of work (think of Plan - Promote - Report as a continuous cycle):
Declare
Prepare a Climate Emergency Declaration document and have it adopted by the council. Use the IMPACT Carbon Calculator to help understand your community’s carbon footprint.
Plan
Decide on a set of carbon reducing actions. Start with a small handful and write them down into a Carbon Reduction Plan. Then put the effort in to execute that plan.
Promote
Promote use of the Toolkit to the community by whatever means are available to you (notice boards, local events, websites, social media and outlets within and so on).
Report
Use the Local Council Report generated from within the Toolkit to measure progress and refine your Carbon Reduction Plan, removing and adding policies as necessary.
If you’d like to learn more about how we can work with your local council, drop us an email at admin@placebasedinitiative.co.uk.
What support is available to help local councils?
There’s an extensive Resource Pack that’s available to all local councils. Just contact us and we’ll send it to you. It’s developing further all the time, so you’ll find the support provided getting better and better as time goes on.
The Resource Pack contains:
Declare
A template Local Council Climate Emergency Declaration for you to complete.
Furthermore, amongst other things, it talks about achieving community engagement on climate matters through use of The Great Collaboration Toolkit.
Plan
A template Carbon Reduction Plan for you to complete, tied directly to the actions within the Toolkit, so it’s easy to see how policies support the most locally relevant actions. By having the council and the local population using the same set of actions, it’s easy for everyone to be talking the same language.
Promote
An extensive pack of materials to help you plan and deliver the promotion of the Toolkit within your community.
There’s a promotion plan, posters for events, photos, social media posts, a list of upcoming environment days and so on.
Report
The Local Council Report is generated from within the Toolkit, as often as is needed to support local council decision making.
It uses summarised and anonymous information so that individuals’ privacy is respected.
If you’d like to learn more about how we can work with your local council, drop us an email at admin@placebasedinitiative.co.uk.