Energy Champions Training

At our installation launch we heard from Alex Hartley who told us about the Energy Café run in Lewisham. This amazing project is something we’d like to copy and run in Battersea and Alex had a course to help us to do this. It would take 21 hours working together to learn how to help our neighbours – and ourselves – to get out of fuel debt and to get the best deal for our energy money.

We were excited and enthused by the success of the lighting installation at the Doddington & Rollo Business and Community Centre. Now we would cascade the benefits into the neighbourhood.

Just before Christmas 2017 we began. We learned so much in our first day together. For some of us the experiences we were dealing with were very near to home. For others the course was a revelation. It certainly was fun and Hadas Hagos brought refreshments from the ‘Waste Not Want Not Project’ that she runs locally to fuel our learning!

There is a lot of information to take on board. Not all of it is technical. In fact a lot of the work of an Energy Champion is to communicate with people who have serious issues with stretching their budgets to cover their fuel costs. Dealing with debt and taking back control is not instant and it is a skill that takes trust, knowledge, resources and an open mind to achieve.

We each got a low energy use LED bulb at the end of the session and shared our top tips for energy savings. I liked ‘switch off the energy vampires’, all those devices and pieces of equipment that sit quietly sucking up the electricity in the background of our technological lives.

Maureen