Sustainable Charlbury starts the New Year with £60,000 of additional funding to support its community grants program. The extra money will go towards projects such as insulating the roof and upgrading doors and windows at Charlbury primary school, installing solar panels and a large battery for energy storage at Charlbury Community Centre, as well as LED lighting at the town’s tennis club and Finstock primary school.
Funded by the solar farm
In past years, Sustainable Charlbury has received an income of £30,000 to put into community projects. This has been financed by surplus revenues from the sale of renewable energy generated at Southill Solar farm, run by our sister organisation Southill Community Energy (SCE).
Shortly before Christmas, SCE’s board decided that the allocation for the current financial year (which runs until April) would be increased by an additional £60,000 to £90,000 for the year.
Improved finances
The big increase in funding was made possible by an improvement in the financial situation, apparent over the last couple of years. The amount of power generated has exceeeded predictions due to longer, sunnier summers, while prices received for electricity sold to the grid have also been higher than anticipated. Meanwhile, debt charges have fallen. As a result, the solar farm has built up significant cash reserves.
Before agreeing to extra funds for the grants programme, SCE’s board needed convincing that a sensible strategy was in place to spend the money wisely. At the same time, a financial modelling exercise was carried out to make sure there would still be ample reserves available to cover other contingencies.
More demand for grants
A strong argument for increasing the size of the pot was that the number of applications for funding has greatly increased since the community grant programme started five years ago. As awareness has spread, demand has risen to the point where the number of requests from good projects deemed worthy of funding has begun to outstrip the supply of funds.
Another driver for increasing the amount of money available was that Sustainable Charlbury has become more ambitious in its aims. As well as continuing to support projects with one-off grants of a few hundred or thousands of pounds, SusCha is now additionally looking to form longer term partnerships, involving larger disbursements spread over several years for an agreed programme of activities.
Longer-term partnerships
The relationship built up with Charlbury primary school is an example of what we would like to do more of. Over the past few years, the school has received a series of substantial grants for a range of things from restoring the fabric of the school building to putting awareness of environmental issues into the curriculum.
This partnership approach has great potential to deliver lasting results but it requires adequate funding.
The £60,000 of extra money for grants applies for this financial year only but it may signal the shape of things to come. While there are no guarantees – circumstances may change – the building blocks are in place for a significant increase in the resources available to SusCha to support local community projects in future years.
“The success of Southill Solar is delivering greater levels of community benefit than originally expected. This means more funding available for community projects that reduce energy costs, cut carbon emissions and support nature”
Tim Crisp, Chair of Sustainable Charlbury
