Our Work
Our new set of projects is funded by The National Lottery Community Fund (TNLCF), which supports groups to do work that strengthens their local community. We are one of the ‘good causes’ to which Lottery players contribute when they buy lottery tickets.
Our grant of £1,995,503.67 for 2023–2027 comes from TNLCF’s Climate Action Fund, which aims to help communities across the UK address climate change. Mainly, this happens by supporting people to adapt their lifestyles in achievable, realistic and innovative but repeatable ways.
For further details of how the Climate Action Fund operates and what it will fund, click here.
Our programme of projects is designed to help residents and businesses in the Bude Community Network Area prepare for and protect themselves and our surroundings against the vast uncertainties that lie ahead because of climate change.
Our projects will also help residents, businesses and visitors contribute towards reducing our community’s energy use, thereby mitigating our contributions to the climate crisis.
All these evidence-based projects are based on extensive research, community consultation and pilots conducted from 2020–2022, financed by a previous £200,000 Lottery grant.
Find out more about each one below.
- OUR PROJECTS -
SUSTAINABLE
TOURISM
PROJECT
Our Sustainable Tourism project will bring together businesses, the community and visitors to collaborate in building resilience and reducing emissions in the visitor economy. Tourism supports 73% of local businesses and 40% of our jobs, while generating around 50% of our community’s carbon footprint. These factors and our geographical isolation, far from the extent of public services enjoyed in other parts of Cornwall and the UK, make our local economy highly vulnerable to climate change. Consequently, the Lottery’s funding is a vital investment to help the local businesses on which our community depends adapt and survive. Without it, climate change will damage our jobs and our local economy, which will have profound impacts on our community’s wellbeing and health, and on Bude’s long-term viability as a coastal destination and as a place to live a decent life.
Among various initiatives, this project will support 10 local ‘Climate Champion’ businesses to mentor 50 local ‘Climate Pioneer’ tourism businesses to cut their carbon footprints by 50% over five years by sharing best practices. This kind of assistance would usually cost thousands of pounds to a business, but the Lottery funding means we can provide it because it will bring about changes that benefit our community and our town.
We’ll also be developing and applying a host of other initiatives, such as a tourism-specific carbon footprint calculator and an innovative accreditation scheme, that we’ll be testing and refining in this innovative and dynamic project. Our initiatives also aim to protect and enhance the natural environment, upon which the visitor economy and our own wellbeing are so reliant.
Bude Area Tourist Board will be delivering this project in collaboration with Exeter University, Cornwall Action for Sustainable Tourism and other partners, such as the National Trust and Cornwall Wildlife Trust.
To find out more about our strategy and the reasons behind it, please download our Sustainable Tourism report.
SHORELINE
ENGAGEMENT
PROJECT
Our Shoreline Engagement Project is now well underway. It aims to bring the community together through a range of initiatives to make crucial collective decisions about how we are going to respond to the impacts of sea-level rise on our shoreline, town and environment, as well as wider changing climate issues to the wider Bude area.
In the first project of its kind in the UK, the Environment Agency has created a set of photo-like visualisations of what the shoreline at Summerleaze and Crooklets beaches will look like within 30 years. The visualisations have been modelled from robust datasets, and the intention is to make what are often quite complicated sets of data really easy to understand.
In response to this, Bude Climate Partnership will be inviting local residents and businesses to play a vital and active democratic role in shaping Bude’s future - in the form of a Citizens' Jury, taking place this autumn, 2023. The whole point of the jury is to sift through the evidence and work towards a set of recommendations that will ultimately inform the responsible authorities as to how our community wants to respond to the impacts of sea level rise and a changing climate.
You can see the Environment Agency visualisations and further information on the jury process by clicking below.
ENERGY
EFFICIENCY
PROJECT
Our Energy Efficiency project will mean cosier homes with lower heating costs coupled to lower carbon footprints. It has the potential to unlock up to £400,000 of further funding, all of which will be spent on helping Bude residents to heat their homes more efficiently.
Depending on residents’ circumstances, we can help them access home improvements grants and other funding that will save them money by reducing their energy use, while making their homes warmer. This free service can also be accessed by local businesses and we have taken on a full-time Low Carbon Energy Officer to help us with this project, working through our delivery partner Community Energy Plus.
Get in touch with Jon if you're a resident or local business and would like to find out more about how he can advise you to become more energy efficient. Contact him here: jon.vidler@cep.org.uk
- THREE COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT PROJECTS -
LIBRARY
OF
THINGS
A Library of Things will reduce consumption and waste – and bring about real savings, especially to those on lower incomes – by lending essential but less frequently used household items to our residents and visitors, such as DIY and gardening equipment, camping gear, beach items or toys.
COMMUNITY
GROWING
SCHEME
A Community Growing scheme will bring people together to learn about and share experiences growing vegetables, fruits and environmentally beneficial plants, such as flowers that attract pollinators, in a communal garden and at home.
COMMUNITY
STORYTELLING
PROJECT
Our Community Storytelling project brings people together to share memories about the wider Bude area, its heritage and our collective relationship with the place we all share.
In 2022, we piloted a series of workshops in which retirees shared their memories and hopes for the future. Their conversations about what they love about Bude and what they want to protect for future generations prompted widespread behaviour change, such as a much greater awareness of what we can all do to reduce the risk of flooding and a greater understanding of how our spending choices can translate into environmental harm. These adaptations make us all more resilient to the uncertainties due to climate change that we’re already experiencing and which lie ahead. Over the next years, we’ll be expanding these workshops to all parts of the community.
All our community digital stories are accompanied by extensive packs of resources to inform and assist people in adapting to climate change, all of which can be found on our website or borrowed from our office, when it opens at Bude Tourist Information Centre.
Programme Management
Finally, the rest of the grant is budgeted for all the tasks, roles and responsibilities necessary to make our projects work and ensuring they meet the needs of our local community.
Jobs
We’ll be improving local employment with year-round positions and training for up to six people in full-time and part-time roles. They’ll be playing an essential role in helping us deliver the projects.
Investment
We’ll be supporting local small businesses and freelance workers by paying them to help us deliver parts of some of the projects, or in some cases, an entire project under our supervision.
Training
Working with The Carbon Literacy Project, we’ll be bringing accredited climate literacy training to hundreds of businesses and residents in the wider Bude area. This will inform them how to cut their carbon footprints, helping them save money and the planet.
Information
To keep the community informed, we’ll be making lots of resources and toolkits available to advise residents and businesses about building resilience and their journey to a carbon-free future. We’ll also be letting you know what we’re doing through our social media, our website, and films and events.
Learning
The Lottery requires us to undertake various other activities required by our grant, such as annual assessments by external evaluators of the work we’re doing. These assessments will keep us on track, let the community see what we’re doing and enable us to learn from our experiences.
Sharing
What we do in Bude is a testbed for climate adaptation elsewhere, so we’ll be actively sharing our learning and experiences with other coastal communities in Cornwall and more widely across the UK.