Wirksworth Transition Community Land Trust Annual Report 2023
We’ve had a very busy year, with some successes and some frustrations.
Our biggest success has been our second Open Eco Homes event – put on for people considering improving their home energy measures by visiting local homes where energy efficiency measures have already been installed - held on the weekend of 22-23 July. We had eight homes open offering different numbers of tours – from two to seven over the two days, each having set a maximum number that could come on a tour. That gave a total potential number of 200 tours! 120 tours were booked. It might have been more, but unfortunately our use of Eventbrite meant that some tours appeared to be fully booked but that was misleading and some were not. We won’t use that booking system next time.
For our Home Energy Surveys, we made first use of our thermal imaging camera, funded by Better Derbyshire Dales Fund, from November 2022 until the end of February 2023, when the contrast between outdoor and indoor temperatures makes the camera more effective in showing heat loss. We surveyed 15 local houses for people who wanted to know where their home might be losing heat and to discuss possible solutions. We then produced a report for each house. The tours were offered for a minimum donation of £10, although free for anyone who said they couldn’t afford it. People were very generous. We sent out feedback forms but only recently. The replies were generally positive, but we believe we still have work to do to improve how we do the surveys.
Our third project is trying to get the revised Derbyshire Dales Local Plan to include mandatory higher energy efficiency standards for new build houses, starting with social housing. We sent a report to make our case over a year ago to the councillors and officers doing the review. It hasn’t been possible to have any verbal discussions about our report, which has been disappointing. The local election in May resulted in a Labour, Lib Dem, Green coalition called the “Progressive Alliance”. We are pleased that one of our trustees, Roger Shelley, is now on the council, and is on the Local Plan Sub-committee, so we expect to be kept better informed.
We were fortunate to be offered, out of the blue, to recruit a student intern from marketing students at the University of Derby. We had never considered an intern because we didn’t have the money to pay someone, but the U of Derby had a programme funded by the EU, where the money to pay the interns was provided. Sadly, it is now finished.
The student we recruited was a graduate doing a Masters, so we struck it lucky. Ros Povillionis spent 80 hours rebuilding our website, introducing us to software for creating posters and flyers, and helping us learn more about electronic communications with members, stakeholders and the public. We have one volunteer helping with our Facebook presence, but we still need someone to add more information to our website. It could become a very useful source of information about retrofitting.
Our main problem is too few people to do everything we want to do. We ran a campaign to recruit volunteers and trustees, which produced two volunteers offering specific help, but no potential trustees. Mary Ann Hooper, Chair
Wirksworth Transition Community Land Trust
Treasurers Report- 11.04.23
Account for year 5.4.22 – 4.4.23
| 5.4.22 - 04.04.23 | |
|---|---|
| Balance@5.4.22 | £2,359.41 |
| income | |
| donations | £ 78.00 |
| grants | £ 500.00 |
| Subscriptions in | £ 10.00 |
| surveys | £330.00 |
| total | £ 918.00 |
| expenditure | |
| newsletter | £ 291.37 |
| subscriptions out | £ 434.00 |
| training | £ 87.91 |
| future homes | £ 108.99 |
| repaidgrant | £ 900.00 |
| Admin | £ 95.00 |
| total | £ 1,917.27 |
| balance | £ 1,360.14 |
| bank balance | £1,360.14 |
Net out going £999.27, (£900 repaid grant)
Post end of year payments 11.4.23 Mailchimp – 12.61 11.4.23 Nat CLT - 375.00 Balance at 11.4.23 = £972.53