Two weeks on

Hello.
 

It is now two weeks since the first Bristol Green Doors open homes event and after a lot of very, very hard work Kate and I have both had a chance to relax and reflect. So how was it? Well basically it was great and we want to do another one next year! Here are a few thoughts and an update so you appreciate where we are at.
 

Over a sunny and dry weekend, we had over 2600 visits to the 52 homes which means each home had a mean average of over 50 visitors. However, with in excess of 150 people dropping in on five homes and seven homes having under seven people going through their green door, a principle aim for next year will be to achieve a more even distribution of visits to homes.
 

Visitors included a number of councillors including council leader Barbara Janke and Bristol West MP Stephen Williams (below left with Cllr Neil Harrison) who hopefully will be enthusing about our efforts to Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change fellow Lib- Dem Chris Huhne. (See below for more).

It was clear that generally afternoons brought more visits than mornings and Sunday was better than Saturday for numbers too. Whilst the homes with chickens and solar train sets proved that novelties could also bring in the numbers, it is most evident that above all visitors really appreciated the quality discussions with real people who had implemented energy efficiency measures to their homes.
 

Within 72 hours of the weekend Kate and I contacted all householders who had almost unanimous positive responses to the event. From this we know that we now have a solid base of people ready to open up again in the future. Thanks again to all the householders and the superb team of volunteers who helped them.
 

We have collected in about 300 visitor feedback forms so far and are inputting the responses into a database kindly made for us as a result of an appeal through Just for the Love of It. Looking at the comments on the forms, the words “informative”, “inspiring”, “passionate” and “thank you” keep appearing which is extremely heartening.

   
We will use all the feedback, and that of the householders, neighbourhood groups and hubs, to inform our report whose findings we will share with all partners and sponsors at an event before the end of the year. At this get togetether we will ask for input from all these parties into next year’s September event so make some notes now!

Much of the future success of Bristol Green Doors is dependent on establishing an effective directory based website and though what we have had up till now has been well visited, we are keen to develop it. This came up and was well recieved in a great meeting last week with the Energy Saving Trust, one of our key partners,and with developers Circle Interactive who are helping us move the current site on to reflect the various aims of Bristol Green Doors, so keep visiting!

The website changes and encouragement of traffic support our intentions to promote and encourage the retrofitting of homes in Bristol. This demands a consistent profile above that of merely an annual open homes event and is why our two month programme is so important. Indeed the Mark Letcher talk at the Architecture Centre, and the subsequent discussion between various architects and structural engineers, underlined how the programme can add real meat to our aims. With people signing up for the programme's courses, an FoE report facilitating very healthy progress on our Rights and Regulations event and community energy schemes gaining acclaim across the UK, we look forward to this continuing. We ask you to take a look at what is coming up in the programme and consider what you or your organisation could offer.

Some indication of how progress can be made was given recently at Kellaway Building Supplies’ Horfield branch on Wednesday (above) where whilst manning a stand we were offered the use of their Ashton training centre for retrofitting courses for builders. Interestingly we also met a great builder who had externally insulated two houses in Bristol that we didn’t know about before and of course it would be great to have houses like this as part of next year’s open homes event.
 

So all in all it has been a very exciting and satisfying few months and we feel we have made a very promising start to establishing our flagship event and also our Community Interest Company. The development of the latter will speed up in October as our partnership with Carbon Leapfrog commences which will enable us to receive free professional advice from leading service providers across a range of disciplines.This is great as we are acutely aware of a multitude of constraints that will be acting on us in the coming months and, as Bristol Green Doors needs to be able to run as an ongoing and sustainable concern, working out where we fit in these recessionary times is a crucial question.

We clearly have a role to build awareness locally and in the coming weeks much will be made of the Green Deal (below left) which will raise the profile of retrofitting and demand for retrofitting across the UK. The harsh reality is that to reach the carbon reduction target from UK homes of 29% by 2020, we need whole house retrofits delivered at a reate of 6 per minute over the next 10 years and something tells me government is going to need every bit of help possible to make these targets achievable. This is where our position on a local level can become clearer and more valued, particularly if we start thinking about the big society (below right).

It is on the (last but one note) that I am excited about attending the forthcoming Transition Network workshop (held conveniently here in Bristol) which “will examine the Tories’ Big Society implications, threats and opportunities and discuss how the Transition movement responds to it”. For me this is really, really important because a huge amount of Bristol Green Doors success already can be attributed to the efforts of the city’s people and this grass roots element is our strength and value and is exactly why we chose to represent these efforts in our Planet Bristol image.

So to finish, a reminder / appeal to all of you who have been so positive about Planet Bristol. We have a limited number of 50 x 50 cm prints signed by Andy Council available through our website's shop, the sale of which can contribute significantly to our progress over coming months. Please consider how one of these could grace your office or living room and how great it would look!
 

Thanks for reading this and all your support.