We currently have exciting opportunities for a part-time admin volunteer and volunteers to join our fundraising group! Find out more below or on out website.
Ever wondered how to cook food that is good for you and the planet? To find out, join us this Friday to watch PlanEAT and enjoy a delicious, sustainable dinner. It is possible to make good, healthy and sustainable food, we’ll prove that on Friday. The day before, on Thursday, Transition Cambridge will be brainstorming the future of transport with short talks, information stands and open discussion on the topic. Join in the discussion to help create visions for transport of the future.
The Work that Reconnects workshop is on 15 – 17 June, so if you’d like to learn how to turn your concerns and emotions into action, join us for a truly inspirational weekend. This weekend workshop is just outside of Cambridge, on an organic farm in the beautiful fens, providing the perfect background to strengthen the feeling of interconnectedness with nature.
PlanEAT: Dinner and a Movie 8 June
Friday 8 June, 6.30 – 9pm, Ross Street Community Centre
This June, Cambridge Carbon Footprint presents an evening event that food lovers won’t want to miss.
For the first time in Cambridge we will be screening PlanEAT, a remarkable and award-winning film about the search for a diet that is good for our health, good for the environment and good for the future of the planet. With an additional cast of pioneering chefs and some of the best cooking you have ever seen, the scientists and doctors in the film present a convincing case for the West to re-examine its love affair with meat and dairy.
PlanEAT shows how so many of the problems we face today can be solved, without simply resorting to a diet of lentils and lettuce leaves. To prove it, we’ll be serving a delicious plant-based dinner too, and provide recipies to take home.
Tickets are on a sliding scale, £10, £20 or £30 (pay what you can – £10 just covers the cost of the event, £20 and £30 allows us to fundraise). Send us an email toinfo@cambridgecarbonfootprint.org or ring us on 01223 301842 and we’ll add you to the guest list. We’ll confirm your place once you’ve made a minimum £10 donation either by cheque (made payable to Cambridge Carbon Footprint) or cash in person or via mail to our office.
To find out more and watch the trailer, visit our website.
We also need 3 volunteers for the evening! The movie and meal will be included for volunteers. Please get in touch with Stephanie if you can help.
The Work that Reconnects: a weekend workshop 15 – 17 June
Friday (evening) – Sunday 15 – 17 June, Cambridge Sustainability Centre, Fen End Farm, Oxholme Drove, Cottenham, CB24 8UP
Following our hugely successful day workshop in January, we are happy to offer this chance to go more deeply into our sense of interconnectedness with the world and release our energy to take positive action in our lives. This is for anyone who is concerned about the condition of our world and would like to strengthen their ability to respond? ‘The Work That Reconnects’ is an ecopsychological approach developed by Joanna Macy (seewww.joannamacy.net for info). Deepening our feeling of connection with life, we will open up spiritual and psychological resources needed to face and respond to global issues. Through experiential practices we will explore how to use the energy of our emotional responses, reconnect with our passion to act for life and transform concern for the world into creative engagement.
The workshop will be facilitated by Anna McIvor, Bev Sedley and Liz Serocold and will be hosted by the Cambridge Sustainability Centre. Cost £50-£100, depending on your ability to pay. Most of us will be camping and we will be cooking together. More info here and book here through the Cambridge Sustainability Centre.
This event is offered jointly by the Cambridge Sustainability Centre, Cambridge Carbon Footprint and Transition Cambridge.
Sharing in the Community 20 June
Wednesday 20 June, 7 – 9pm, Hills Road, near the station
Join us at Bev’s house for an evening of sharing:
• bring a dish of seasonal food to share
• ‘make do and mend’ – share or learn a skill to revitalize old items
• help us to create a list of useful equipment we can lend each other (eg garden tools – Mary has included her sewing machine!)
This evening, an off-shoot of our ‘Living well with less stuff’ project and blog, is open to anyone on our mailing list who would like to participate or just find out more. To get us started, Fiona is going to demonstrate how she alters and creates new clothes from charity shop buys. (You are also welcome to bring along small making or mending project you are in the middle of.)
This event coincides with a ‘Sharing in the Community’ day organised by the New Economics Foundation (nef) as part of their Festival of Transition, and the nef event is designed to coincide with the first day of the Earth Summit in Rio. If you don’t know the nef website, it is a mine of useful information on how to develop a more sustainable economy.
Do join us, however much or little you feel able to contribute. Email Bev to
* find out more about it
* book your place
* let us know what skills you are interested in, whether to learn or share
CCF Summer Social 27 June
Wednesday 27 June, 7 – 9.30pm, Sturton Street
Let’s take an evening to kick back and celebrate all the hard work we’ve done so far this year. Meet some other volunteers and CCF supporters and get a sneak peek into what’s in store for the rest of the year.
If you’re interested in volunteering this is a perfect chance to learn more and meet some of our current volunteers. Hopefully the weather will be fine and we can sit outside, maybe light a fire.
Feel free to bring along some nibbles to share. Please RSVP so we have an idea of numbers and can give you the address (Sturton Street). See you there!
Open Eco Gardens this July! 14 July
Saturday 14 July, 11am – 2pm
Mark your diaries for July 14, Open Eco Gardens is here! Similar to our annual Open Eco Homes event, we are going to be opening up the gates to some of Cambridge’s Eco Gardens for guided tours and questions.
We consider an Eco Garden to be one which includes at least one of the following: food growing, water conservation, encourages wildlife, or uses permaculture design. Community gardens, allotments, home gardens, college gardens and public gardens will all be showcased.
We still need a few more gardens to include in the event: if you want to share your garden, please get in touch with Stephanie. It can be of any size or complexity: having a variety of realistic examples is important so visitors can gain inspiration no matter what space they have available to them!
Welcome to Elizabeth Bruce, our new co-ordinator
As you know, Mary Geddes, our highly-valued co-ordinator, is leaving the job (but not CCF!) at the end of June, and we are happy to say that we have appointed Elizabeth Bruce as her successor. Elizabeth will be starting at the beginning of July and working on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. Elizabeth has been working in the low carbon field for many years, particularly with community organisations on community renewables projects. She has lots of organizational and administrative experience.
We are also delighted that Mary is staying on as a volunteer, coming in one morning a week to help with our book keeping. You’ll hopefully also see her at our events!
Could you be our new office admin volunteer?
Are you looking for office experience? Do you have a keen interest in environmental issues? Could you volunteer your time 3 mornings a week for 3 to 6 months for a small, friendly environmental charity in Cambridge? If so, we’d like to hear from you!
You would be:
- Dealing with events bookings
- Dealing with phone and email enquiries
- Taking bookings for Open Eco Gardens
- Inputting data
- Managing newsletter sign-ups
- Maintaining parts of our website (for which training would be given in WordPress)
- Occasional postering around the town
- Other sundry tasks as required
We are looking for someone:
- Well-organised
- Reliable, committed and friendly
- With good communication skills, both written and verbal
- With basic IT skills (we can provide some training)
- Who already lives locally
You would be working alongside our Volunteer and Events organiser and the CCF Co-ordinator, plus our board of six Trustees.
Interested? Then please send your CV and a covering letter to Mary Geddes by 5pm on Tuesday 12th June. We will be interviewing applicants on Wednesday 20th June
Fundraising success: £1641 raised on May 14th
Cambridge Carbon Footprint would like to say a huge thank you to all our supporters who gave so generously on May 14th as part LocalGiving May Match Fund. Together we raised £1641 (including fund matching and gift aid).
Your commitment to helping us work together to build a more sustainable future is greatly appreciated. CCF’s core funding from Cambridge City Council finished at the end of March. Your donations will therefore make a big difference to our activities. Funds raised from this event will support projects like our Open Eco Homes eco-renovation event this month and a skillsfest planned for the autumn.
Fundraising target + events: ceilidh and auction of goods and promises
As you probably know, our core funding from the City Council finished at the end of March. We knew this was coming, and, through the generosity of our donors, we have built up enough reserve funds to enable us to keep going into next year at our present level of staffing, but this cannot last. If we want to keep going in 2013 and beyond, we will have to raise substantially more ourselves. At a recent fundraising committee meeting, we set ourselves the target of raising an additional £25,000 over the next year.
To help us achieve this target, we have formed an events fundraising group (Andrea, Roy and Bev) and are having a meeting on Monday June 18th at 7.30pm. We are planning a series of fundraising events over the next year and we would really welcome more people to help us with the planning and organisation! We plan to hold a ceilidh in the autumn and an auction of goods and promises in February, so please contact Bev if you would like to get involved! Also contact Bev if you would like to come to the fundraising events meeting on Monday June 18th at 7.30pm or have any other ideas for events.
Eating Local summer invitation!
It’s now eight months since we began our six-week Eating Local project and we will soon be starting the final challenge of the year (and surely the easiest!) with our Summer 2012 Eating Local Project! For those of you who haven’t heard of this, a group of us undertake to eat local, seasonal food for six weeks (with local meaning within a 30-mile radius for most things, but we do allow ourselves five exceptions, such as tea, coffee or chocolate – whatever you decide!). We also blog about it on the CCF website.
If you’ve been thinking about this but felt daunted because of the lack of choice at other times of the year (although it’s surprising how much there is available, even in January!) then this is the season for you! Think strawberries, salad vegetables, courgettes, beans, new potatoes….. If you would like to take part in this project (even if you don’t want to blog) or just find out more about it, contact Bev. To see how we got on in our previous challenges, visit our website .
This time you don’t have to do it for the full six weeks – we are coming up to the holiday season and we thought some of you might be put off because you are going to be away for some of the time. You are welcome to join us for however long you can manage! It’s fun, sociable (regular get-togethers, bring-and-share meals) and a real eye-opener about where our food comes from – those of us who have tried already have found that, even if we don’t continue in the strictest version of the challenge once we’ve finished, it has a long-lasting and beneficial effect on our eating habits. To help you, we have a lot of useful resources on our website: local food directory,
lists of foods in season and recipes!
From Saturday June 9th to Saturday July 21st
Join the new Continuing Carbon Conversations group!
On Monday evening June 25th we will have our first meeting of the new Continuing Carbon Conversations group. This is for anyone who has participated in Carbon Conversations at any time. Many people find that it is so much easier to continue to make important lifestyle changes when supported by others – I know that being with like-minded people has made all the difference to me personally.
The group will meet every two or three months for four evening sessions, starting on June 25th. Dates to be decided once we know who is interested, but the second one will be in September.
This is what one participant said about our first Continuing Carbon Conversations group, which finished recently: ” Joining the carbon conversations revisited group was just what I needed to make me re-look at the plans I had made during my carbon conversations course. It reminded me of all the things I planned to do that I had actually done (Yeah! A nice feeling!) and inspired me to get on with the rest! It was great to meet a new group of carbon conversations “graduates” too and to share some stories of what we’d all been doing to reduce our carbon footprints.” (Fiona)
Email me, Bev, if you are interested.
Book a talk or workshop by our outreach team!
If you or someone you know would like a talk or workshop about climate change, from a communications workshop to a Carbon Conversations taster session, then visit our new outreach section on the website! Our outreach team is happy to run something for adults or children.
In praise of second hand stuff!
Have you seen the growing number of adverts around Cambridge at the moment advertising new houses, but also shiny new lifestyles? We’d like to create some similar images but using second hand things instead. If anyone is interested in spreading the message that second hand stuff can look just as good, if not better, than new things then please get in touch. Whether you are a budding photographer, a marketing wizz or have a passion for second hand items – we’d love to hear from you.
Siblings, justice and equality – fairness matters for climate change
In exploring motivations to act on climate change, have we ignored the influence of one of the crucial relationships of family life – that of siblings? Recent work from the Joseph Rowntree foundation finds that fairness is key.
Read more at www.rorandall.org
The Spirit Level film – help make it happen!
Having read the book The Spirit Level by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, I think this film is one that could really make a difference in the world, in the way that Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth did for climate change a few years ago. The book gives evidence from around the world to show that inequality of income is at the bottom of many seemingly unrelated evils of the modern world (and more equal societies are more concerned about issues such as climate change, poverty and justice). The Equality Trust is trying to raise the funds to make this film and one way they are doing it is for people to pre-buy a copy of the film within the next four weeks – it only costs $12 (and don’t be put off by the American payment website – the project is a UK one and I found it very easy to pay over the internet). This book really impressed our CCF book group last year!
Bev Sedley
Still time to get the solar PV FIT rate of 21p
If you’ve been thinking of getting solar PV installed, now is the time to do it. The FIT (feed-in tariff) rate for home installations will stay at 21p until August 1st but then go down to 16p per kilowatt hour. The Centre for Alternative Technology has calculated that the 21p is still good value – see the CAT website for further details.
Cambridge Future Transport Visions: How will we get around? 7 June
Thursday 7 June, 7.30 – 9.30pm, St. Lukes Church Community Centre, Victoria Road
This Transition Cambridge event is all about generating ideas for making transport in Cambridge more sustainable. To get the discussion going there will be some short talks from: Gary Armstrong from Outspoken Delivery, Sian Berry from Campaign for Better Transport, Mark Webb of Travel for Work and Jim Chisholm of CamCycle. Also there will be information stands from: Electric Bike Sales, School Run Centre and Outspoken Delivery. However, the main part of the evening will be an open space discussion, so do come along and take part! More details here .
The man who planted trees + tree planting discussion 14 June
Thursday 14 June, 7.30 – 9pm, CB1 Cafe, Mill Road
“The Man who Planted Trees” by Jean Giono is a beautiful and inspiring story of a man who planted a whole forest in France, and how it turned the land from a barren wasteland into a living place. The story was turned into an animated film in 1987 by Frédéric Back and it earned a number of awards. Following the film, we’ll hear from Liz Serocold about the Trees for Life programme which has been planting trees in the Scottish Highlands since 1989. So far they have planted 800,000 trees and have helped to restore 4,500 hectares. We’ll finish by discussing opportunities for tree planting closer to home. If you know of any suitable areas for tree planting in and around Cambridge, please come along or get in touch!
This event is free and is open to everyone. The Transition Cafe is open from 7pm, and is a great way to find out more about Transition activities and to meet others involved in Transition Cambridge.
Green Enterprise: Carl Dodd, founder of Property Revolutions June 25
Monday 25 June, 7.30 – 9.30pm, Friends Meeting House, 12 Jesus Lane
Carl Dodd, founder of Property Revolutions, will discuss “the journey to affordable sustainable housing”. He will share his personal journey, including what he is doing now to make high efficiency, green buildings more affordable.
As his experience includes the inspirational MSC Advanced Architecture and Energy Studies course at the Centre for Alternative Technology, re-training builders, dealing with planners, renewable energy and employing design partners in Moldova (and the UK), I’m sure it will be a fascinating evening for anyone interested in innovation in the building sector, or who hankers after an affordable greener home.
Transition Cambridge Home Energy Fair 5 July
Thursday 5 July, 7 – 9pm, Emmanuel United Reform Church, 72 Trumpington Street, CB2 1RR (opposite the bottom of Downing Street, parking in Trumpington Street or in the Downing Street car park)
Transition Cambridge is hosting a Home Energy Fair, which will be of interest to many in Cambridge Carbon Footprint.
There will be short talks on The Green Deal, LED lighting, PV Panels and Feed-in Tarrifs, as well as stalls from local suppliers of everything from insulation to solar panelsWe’ll have a stall there too, to show how home energy fits into the rest of your carbon footprint, what behaviour changes might make a big difference to your home energy usage, and the resources Cambridge Carbon Footprint has on offer to help you with your home renovation plans.
Entry is free. For further details and a full list of stalls please visit the Energy Fair’s websitehere.