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started on 18/10/2007 16:14
A new fund has launched which aims to encourage people to reduce emissions in their communities. Check it out at: I’ve skimmed some of the rules of applying, but if someone has time to go through them in more detail to see if Crags might qualify… It does seem a promising funding source… I'll join you!written on 12/12/2007 15:28
Hi John, I agree that it would be a great thing for CRAGs to be involved in, and really unless the communities involved are monitoring their reductions with the precision of CRAGs then the whole thing will be a bit of a waste of time. A few different Transition Towns from around the country are putting in bids, and I’ve spoken to Rob Hopkins about the Carbon Account (beta.thecarbonaccount.com) being part of their bid to help monitor the reductions. I’ll happily act as an intermediary between CRAGs and Transition Towns if there is interest in possibly putting a joint bid together (which I think would be a great idea). Obviously working for Torchbox and managing the Carbon Account, I’d like it if our site could be involved in the project, but understand that there could be issues in doing that. The Cotswold CRAG is having its first proper meeting in early January (see www.sustainablecharlbury.org) and I’m involved in the start of transition town Oxford so we’ll discuss the big green challenge requirements at both of those. My general feeling is that we should go for a national bid (whether that involves ‘CRAGs’ as a whole or a number of individual CRAGs) involving as many groups as possible to make a big impact and try and put all of the £1m to use (if there isn’t one outstanding project they’ll split the money between a number of winners). Let me know your thoughts. Jamie I'm up for this toowritten on 12/12/2007 18:38
Hi All, I would like to help out. I am hoping to have more time from January and was thinking of starting a Sheffield CRAG anyway. I have a colleague at my current job who was in the voluntary sector fund raising who has offered to advise me. He suggests the basic structure of an application : 1. Introduce yourself – who are you, history, constitution (formal constitutuion essential for larger sums) Please - those who can, apply for Crags!written on 14/12/2007 15:32
Thanks to those who’ve recently revived this thread – I simply haven’t had enough time to think about doing an application and would really, really appreciate it if someone did. So Rick and Jamie, both excellent suggestions, and it’d be fantastic if you could do some of the writing for this in the new year. I’m more than happy to be involved in gathering some of the data / evidence that would support our bid, however, so please just drop me a line (send us a message via this thread or the messaging facility). In fact, there should be some material gathered together already, for an earlier bid we made for the Observer Ethical Awards. An injection of cash of this size would be hugely helpful in taking Crags to the ‘next level’ of public consciousness and organisation. Thanks for any help others can offer. I'm happy to start working on something, but...written on 14/12/2007 15:37
It would be good to get some general thoughts from people on two specific points: 1. Whether or not possibly collaborating with Transition Towns to come up with a proposal is a good idea 2. Whether or not including the Carbon Account (http://beta.thecarbonaccount.com) as the tool to monitor our reductions would be a problem Once I have some feedback on those then I’ll start drawing something together. Cheers, Jamie TT and Carbon Accountwritten on 16/12/2007 18:14
1. I think there is some but not complete overlap between Transition Towns and CRAGs. They attract different people and have different philosophies and this isn’t the right thread to go into this. But I would suggest that we (or rather you!) and TT should put in separate proposals that fit together so that if both proposals were funded, TT people could form CRAGs if they wanted. 2. I think it is fine to include Torchbox software as long as you keep the software development and maintenance costs completely separate from everything else and you specify what the licensing arrangements are, or better still, offer alternative licensing arrangements including open source. Feedbackwritten on 17/12/2007 17:44
1. I think Transition Towns and CRAGs are really complimentary. One focuses more on the individual and the other on the community, and there’s nothing to stop the same group of people running both initiatives in parallel. The only issue is the divisions over peak oil. 2. We had a bruising (!) discussion last year over official affilition or not with the Carbon Account. The consensus, in the end, was that we’d stay neutral and CRAGs would just choose whichever they prefered (eg also Carbon Diet or John’s my.carbon). CRAGs can use abacuses but...written on 18/12/2007 18:09
David, CRAGs can use any spreadsheets, web sites or abacuses to calculate carbon emissions and I don’t think that’s going to change. But that shouldn’t prevent a group of people proposing to develop a better calculator or web site that might potentially lead to a lot more CRAGs being formed. I think you have said that but can you confirm? Absolutely right ...written on 19/12/2007 14:37
Oh yes, don’t let stop you using the Carbon Account, or any other calculator in the bid. In fact, I think a combination of proven ideas or tools would be a much stronger proposition. The idea of being “neutral” and open licensed was to encourage the idea to be linked up freely as people saw fit, not to prevent it. So please, absolutely go for it – I’m looking forward to seeing what you come up with. Big Green Challengewritten on 4/1/2008 02:17
I will help with the application. I went to a presentation on it at Uni of E Anglia before Xmas Chris Keene Thanks - now let's get pulling stuff togetherwritten on 4/1/2008 11:29
Thanks to everyone who’s offered to help with the bid. So far we have: So now let’s get moving. The deadline for applications is 29th Feb; no late entries accepted. The form for the bid isn’t actually up on the website yet, as far as I can see – it says it’ll be up there early January. The most important thing I think is that applicant groups need to be formally designated as ‘not-for-profit’, ie have charitable status. We don’t need to get this before applying, but we will need to during the course of the competition. This probably requires a separate discussion about the nature of the Crag organisation – should it be more formally constituted, centralised etc – but in many ways I think simply having formal charitable status wouldn’t change the structure of Crags beyond having a bank account and some trustees. However, I would appreciate people’s thoughts on this, particularly anyone with a good grasp of charity law. Re. pairing up with the Carbon Account, I think that fits perfectly. Perhaps it could allow for online trading in a community without having to be involved in the RSA scheme. Re. joining with any Transition Towns, I’m not so sure. Though they do great work, their scope I feel is somewhat different: peak oil, etc, and not such a sharp focus on carbon reduction. However, the Big Green Challenge is looking for ‘communities’ to cut their carbon, by which it implies quite traditional geographic communities. If our bid has to be focused on one Crag in one town / city, then it might be worthwhile partnering with a Transition Town or similar local group. But I’m keen to put forward the whole Crag network as a community in its own right: one for the 21st century, that meets through the net as well as in people’s living rooms. Most importantly is to get ideas down for how we frame our bid. This can start right away – but will become more structured once the form’s up on the website. Can I suggest we might move discussion now to a private email thread? Those who want to be included send me a message via the Crag site, including their email address in the message? Good ideas...written on 4/1/2008 11:37
I think the idea to move to a private email thread is good and then we can talk in detail about all of the issues Guy mentions. I agree that the biggest challenge will be getting the charity/non-for-profit status sorted. Why don’t we all send our email addresses to Guy and then he can start off the email thread? We should probably post summaries of our discussions on this thread (maybe on a weekly basis) so that people can join the private discussions if they feel they can help with any aspect. Open approachwritten on 6/1/2008 15:32
I’m happy to help out if I can, although I’m going to keep my main focus on the website, where there’s a long TODO list! A private email thread is more convenient and private for developing detailed ideas, but I think we need to make sure that everyone in the community is able to contribute ideas and feed back on those you develop. It needn’t be done via this public website, but an open approach could be a key selling point for the bid. I realise that this can be time-consuming, though, so it could be limited by tight deadlines, and we’d need to be imaginative about how we go about reaching people. CRAG website supportwritten on 8/1/2008 12:42
I am sure that Jamie is thinking about some of these things but here are my thoughts: Social networking. CRAGs don’t form easily at the moment. We need to look at ways people can register with a site and stumble upon others that live near by, or work in the same building and that they like and could potentially form a CRAG. We might want bring people together that that have the same issues, high heating costs, a long commute to work, tortuous school run, low carbon long distance travel. Or we might simply want to bring people together that have similar footprints. Or we might want to allow people to search for potential matching CRAGgers in their area. We can learn a lot from that carbon free space, facebook. copied to the looking for craggers in your area … thread – please add any replies to this there. david. House sharing. Two of the Islington CRAG members have lodgers and lodgers muck up carbon accounts. From a carbon point of view, house sharing is excellent and we want to encourage it but we need to make it easy to account for the arrival and departure of lodgers and other household members that come and go. Home and Office. The division between work and home is dissolving. Many run businesses from home. Many companies and local authorities encourage home working. That presents a problem and an opportunity. The problem is that CRAG members are keen to have work related heating and electricity in their home for work use excluded from their carbon accounts (even if a real Personal Carbon Allowances scheme did not). This can have a big impact on someone’s carbon account and I think we need to look at ways to accurately calculate it rather than just assuming it’s a third or a half. For example on electricity, we might want to simply itemise electricity used for work e.g. the computer and subtract it from the household electricity consumption. The opportunity is that we want to encourage employers to allow employees to choose between working at the office or at home on the basis of carbon emissions. And we should provide that data. In the middle of winter we want people that live near by their work to choose to work in the office and in the summer we want people that live a long way off to work at home. If we can include the carbon emissions of the office building and the other office services then that would be great. copied to the homeworkers and the self-employed … thread – please add any replies to this there. david. Settlement and accounting. This is the most tricky part of a CRAG operating as you need everyone to have updated their accounts before you can settle. Everyone leaves this to the last minute and even then, there may be some queries that require discussion or negotiation. Islington and Hackney CRAG has decided to switch to continuous accounting: any credits for one period can be carried forward into the next. But this does complicate the accounting. Conversion factors change over time and the carbon accountant needs to be able to implement changes at the end of an accounting period requested by the group, for example, we changed our green tariffs on Dec 1 2007. However we also need to also go back and retrospectively change meter readings on one account and recalculate carbon on the conversion factors being used before Dec 1st. This is a bit of a geeky point but I think worth mentioning. business and CRAGwritten on 8/1/2008 16:07
I think you could easily track your business emissions the same way you do personal emissions, but that they should be kept separate. For electricity and home fuel use: in the US if you work from home you write off a certain square footage of the house. This translates to a % of the house. You could write off that percent of your electricity. This isn’t exactly accurate. You could also write off based on the number of hours you work versus hours in the day. There is no perfect answer. For miles: In the US, if you drive for your business you can write it off your taxes. This is different from a work commute, which goes into personal stuff and therefore the CRAG. Generally people keep good records of business miles travelled and you would subtract this from the other miles on the vehicle. Business trips: If the trip is for business, even if you have fun, I think the trip should count as a business trip and not go into your personal CRAG. Since this obviously subtracts a lot from personal emissions, it would be fun to see someone set up a business CRAG model for typical work from home stuff. Obviously something with a supply chain is more complicated. copied to the homeworkers and the self-employed thread – any replies there please. david. Business and Cragwritten on 8/1/2008 18:03
I wrote a comment and not think it got posted so will try again! I agree with Shannon both business and personal should be calculated separately and accounted for in that way,it is easy to do here in states as wfro tax purposes we have to claim everything for business and can be checked on at anytime! I live in a fairly large square footage space built for home/business to allow me as a mother to have the flexibility and freedom to be with my kids more and take time off when they are off. My basement a photographic Studio, which is 1.600sq all for business will now do a carbon foot print on myself again as the last one I did, had all mine mixed, home/business and had a shock! I am aware I am accountable for both but need to be realistic as both are for different usages and needs. And anyone in this kind of situation needs to be aware that both are separate, otherwise like me at first finding my first footprint calculating both together only left me feel low and hopeless! This dilemma and complication has set me behind on forming my Crag group here in GA USA,as many of my members or people interested are in the same position as me from my subdivision, But now I feel i will be able to help and not shock and turn them off with their total foot print. Thank you John Ackers and Shannon for helping understand and finding a way to separate and not giving up! and Shannon generally for all your time and encouragement and practical help! Sometimes trying to do this from USA, can feel isolating as there are some differences from you all in England and here in scale of homes spaces, standards etc,and if not careful ,we can be judged for over indulgence,but in reality each state is very different,what may be norm in maryland is very different to here in GA,average travel to work space here in GA is 1 hour long! and public transport is pracically non exictence here,and distances so spend out that its not parctacl or safe ot use a bike! o we have all got to understand the differences and suggest ideas and work together,i am on a mission now to get GA strong in CRAG! copied to the homeworkers and the self-employed thread – any replies there please! david. Has anyone experienced Global Action Plan EcoTeams ?written on 11/1/2008 13:24
John says that CRAGs don’t form easily at the moment. I have been searching for proven ways to help me start a CRAG for the Sheffield area. I found a report for DEFRA on the government website Climate Challenge The EcoTeams appear to be a limited duration (4 months) but their members might develop the committment to join or form a CRAG to ensure that the benefits are sustained and guard against the Rebound Effect. Has anyone had any practical experience of EcoTeams that we might build & improve on ? Also, does anyone else have any experiences of what the main barriers are to more effective recruiting of people to CRAGs ? Is talk of rationing frightening Jo Public away ? Could the method exemplified by EcoTeams form a softer introduction to CRAGs ? I've been in touch with EcoTeamswritten on 11/1/2008 14:34
Through someone called Sarah Cameron at Global Action Plan. I’ll happily give her a call and let you know her thoughts. boosters and barriers to CRAGSwritten on 11/1/2008 14:41
Dear Rick, A good point indeed. I think one point is that CRAGs are quite hardcore: they are demanding and need a high level of committment, well beyond the range of the average member of an environmental organisation, for example. My experience of groups and group cohesion and purpose is that consensus and ownership are the main motivators of group action. I think CRAGs may well eventually be successful because the format of providing a loose model and some guiding resources is supportive without being prescriptive. People have leeway in interpreting the CRAG formula and there is no authoritative hand hovering over activities. Peckham CRAG is as yet fledgling and we are struggling with the conflict between wanting to present our ideas as we believe in them, and accepting others’ ideas in such a way that we form an equal and equally empowered and committed group. We try to provide discussion activities at each session, and facilitate the meetings in such a way that all are given space to speak. We are building up to consensus decisions about our carbon year, which may be a laborious and long-winded process, but hopefully will ensure higher adherence at the end of it. Not to say we’ve been wildly successful yet, but we’ve not been going long. We’ll report back! Zaria Greenhill I agreewritten on 11/1/2008 14:50
We’re having the first meeting of the Wychwood CRAG on Thursday and because we want to be committed and really try and demonstrate personal carbon rationing/trading, we want to impose financial penalties for CRAGgers that go over the target to pay those who are disciplined to stay under it (inevitably, this is the founding members on the whole). However, we’ve realised that what that says to people with high footprints who might join is – “Sign-up to give us money”! financial penaltieswritten on 11/1/2008 15:02
Hi, I’m sure Craggers have gone through this before, but we are treading very lightly indeed on the financial penalties issue: it’s bound to put high emitters off. Anyone who is going to pay money has to clearly make the decision themselves that that is how the system will work, otherwise of course they will feel exploited and hard done by. It seems to be that the most successful CRAGS don’t have financial penalties, is that correct? Been lurking around the site and that appears to be the trend…correct me if that’s not your experience. And where’s Wychwood? Zaria Greenhill The Wychwoods are in the Cotswoldswritten on 11/1/2008 19:27
I agree that trading will likely put high emitters off, but then so does the name ‘carbon rationing’. The other way to look at is in terms offsetting: many high emitters already voluntarily pay to keep emitting. We’ll reach a decision through discussion in the CRAG formation meeting – check the Wychwood CRAG page after Thursday 17th. Anyone within a ten-mile radius of Charlbury/Witney can join the Wychwood CRAG, and we’ll be using The Carbon Account as our auditing tool. Rick – I know that COIN recently held some events in Sheffield so I’ll see if they have any people who may want to join. rationing or reduction...written on 12/1/2008 20:20
Just to comment on the new Cotswolds CRAG and the comment about ‘Rationing ‘ putting people off, well here in York we have decided to be a Carbon Reduction Action Group, as this is the aim of CRAGs, whether through rationing or other methods. We think that Leeds CRAG has made the same decision, and we don’t want to put people off from joining with complicated concepts like rationing. copied to the rationing vs. reduction thread – please add any replies to this comment there. david. financial penaltieswritten on 29/1/2008 10:19
Here in Leeds we allow members to set their own targets annually and their own rate of penalty. They do have to have a penalty, though. This means that people with big footprints needn’t feel threatened (though the bigger problem may be that they are embarrassed in front of the group) but still have an incentive to reduce, and are able to benefit from the advice of lower-emitting members of the group. Matt :-) CRAG in Sheffieldwritten on 11/1/2008 18:33
Hello Rick M, I have some contacts in Sheffield who are part of a ‘Carbon Concious’ group, they seem pretty active, but for the moment I have forgotten the name of the group. I get occasional group emails, I will be happy to pass the name of the group on, or forward this email to them, when they next contact me. They may be willing to form a CRAG with you. potential CRAGgers in Sheffield... for Rickwritten on 12/1/2008 20:08
Hi Rick and other Sheffieldy folks, I have dug up an old email which has lots of names and email addresses on, but not going to post the emails here as they apparently may get used by spammers… John Cossham Posting email addresswritten on 12/1/2008 21:39
Rick – I’ve sent you an email with some idea for Sheffield CRAGgers. Just to clarify for everyone – the reason it’s a bad idea to put your email address on the web is that some annoying people write programmes to automatically go looking for email addresses so they can send them spam. It doesn’t happen immediately but if your address is up somewhere then it’s pretty much inevitable your address will get found after a while and then the spam will come through increasingly thick and fast. Discussion is on the cragcentral yahoogroupwritten on 13/2/2008 00:32
There are about 6 people feverishly working on this funding application. The discussion is on the old cragcentral yahoogroup. Don't be surprised if suggestions for major changes are politely ignored as this stage! Success: into the BGC shortlist!written on 23/4/2008 17:16
CRAGs have successfully reached the 100-strong shortlist in the 2nd round of the Big Green Challenge! Many thanks to all those who contributed their ideas, time and hard work to developing the bid, which provides a strong basis for developing the plan and budget necessary for the next round. A group of us worked on this in the cragcentral yahoo group: please get in touch if you’d like to get involved in the application process. We’ll soon send out to group admins a summary of the ideas gathered and developed so far (from the forum and elsewhere) – your thoughts on these would be really helpful to shape the next stage of the application. Please send us any comments using the contact form, or add them to the Ideas for Funding thread. Big Green Challenge application process feedbackwritten on 12/6/2008 11:12
just moving jamie’s feedback thread. david 9/7/2008. ps. hope to have an executive summary of carbon clubs up soon – please get in touch if you want a copy of the whole application We’ve just completed the application for the next round of the Big Green Challenge, focusing on the idea to broaden the appeal of CRAGs by launching a kind of sister initiative called ‘Carbon Clubs’. The broad idea for Carbon Clubs is to have a kind of ‘lighter’ version of CRAGs with less emphasis on strict allowances so that we can appeal to lighter greens and build weight-watchers groups for the carbon-heavy. Completing the application form was a rather arduous process (not least because there were 43 questions to answer!) and it was a challenge to get the balance right between making sure we gave NESTA what they wanted, and staying true to CRAGs. Inevitably, a small group (four) of us wrote the main body of it, and although we tried to keep consulting key CRAG members (via our Yahoo email list, CRAG-Central), it was impossible to please everybody, especially as the deadline loomed and we had to make quick decisions about what to include and how to phrase the different ideas. With that in mind, I wanted to post something here to get feedback on how the process has worked so far. Do you feel suitably involved in the process? How we can ensure that we fully engage CRAG members in the writing of future applications? Staying true to the grass-roots nature of CRAGs whilst growing is going to be a challenge, but one that we have to address head-on if we’re going to succeed in cutting increasing amounts of carbon. I’m going to post something on CRAG-Central, but wanted to make sure there was some public debate too. For those of you who have read the application (please contact myself or David Bassendine if you want to read it) I’m going to create a short questionnaire to make sure we’re completely clear about people’s opinions on the various plans included in it. Jamie BGC Feedbackwritten on 10/7/2008 15:35
Well done Jamie and others. I see you are a CRAGer for Hackney and Wychwood as well. I remember your message regarding attending one of our meetings in Hackney. I would be interested in reading the application for BGC. Is it possible to send it over by email? I think it would be nice to come along for a meeting and we could talk about the BGC application. Cheers Nimish Shah Feedback on application processwritten on 12/7/2008 10:40
Hi Jamie, I appreciate you asking. I devoted a lot of time to contributing to the bid (although I was not part of the final drafting group) and was exhausted & super-saturated by the deadline on June 9th. I haven’t even read the final application. I have needed a long break. If the bid is successful, I am willing to contribute further though at a lower level of intensity. I am concerned that the key players in managing the project include people living outside London. There is, of course, a risk of discussions and decision-making being perceived as over-concentrated. I posted a model constitution on CRAG Central sometime ago based on one provided by Voluntary Action Sheffield. I think it will be important that meetings are adequately minuted and those minutes fully distributed. Also, I have offered to become treasurer. If I do so, I would, of course, expect to see evidence that decisions were properly discussed and reached before I would add my signature to any cheque payments. BGC: Almost there!!written on 9/7/2008 15:36
We’re through to the final stage of BGC! Thanks to all who’ve contributed and offered their time to help out with implementing this project (more on that here soon). Congratulations and thumps on the back all round! For now, though, the mammoth process continues with a pitch to the panel mid-next week. So, wish us luck! We’re on the verge of getting there … BGC: We fell at the last hurdle ...written on 29/10/2008 20:29
In case you haven’t heard on the CRAG grapevine yet, we didn’t reach the final 10 lucky winners of the Big Green Challenge (who are listed at http://www.biggreenchallenge.org.uk/finalists/). However, it’s not all bad news as we did develop some great ideas to a relatively advanced stage of planning. Bringing those ideas through to the final twenty of 350 projects shows they had some depth and flair. The application took a huge effort and time commitment from a number of people, so thanks go out to those people. Cheers, guys! Thanks too, to everyone who contributed more indirectly, or who volunteered time to take the project forward in the event we won. Well, we didn’t have the chance to take you up on that, but may be getting back to you soon! It’s fair to say the process wasn’t constructive for a grassroots network. It took time and resources out of the everyday running of things, which we are only now getting back up to speed. And the competitive nature, high demands, and high tempo of the application process project forced us to work in a small group that was quite cut off from local groups. Both of these have stalled progress for a while. We’re gathering this up with comments from other applicants to feed back to NESTA, so hopefully lessons will be learnt. So, what now? I hope we can respark our previous grassroots approach. In this spirit, there are a number of issues it would be good to hear everyone’s thoughts on. First, our stories over the past couple of years, what have we learnt, and where should we go now (see Two years of CRAGs – what's your story?)? Second, there’s gathering ideas and planning for developing this website. And third, there’s getting the CRAG Census up to speed, reviewing what progress we’ve made. I hope all three will shed light on some steps forward … |
big green challenge
John Cossham
I think that this is a good thing for CRAG UK to apply for.
I would be happy to help formulate an application, note the ‘help’ !
I wouldn’t do it by myself! Anybody else want to join me?
John Cossham, York CRAG