Share ideas, tasks, and achievements on things you do to increase your home’s energy and resource efficiency.
Why?
There are a million and one things you can do to reduce carbon emissions in your own home, from turning down the heat, to replacing inefficient light bulbs, to taking a look at that insulation in your attic. But why do it on your own? There are great ways for sharing what we learn about and do in our homes to make them more efficient and friendly places in this shared world. Collaborate. Create a team. Start a neighborhood challenge. The most important aspect is sharing what you know with others! Each action then becomes more effective and more fun!
Taking steps that make your home more energy and resource efficient:
- reduces carbon emissions
- reduces waste
- saves you money
- can increase your home value
Making these changes together as a group or team:
- builds a connection to the people who live around you
- is more fun
- has been shown to make the benefits not only last, but even increase over time!
Even if only 5-10% of the homes in a community are involved in a group, the whole community will benefit! For more information visit Global Action Plan International
How?
Recipe for a Neighborhood Team Effort to Increase Home Energy and Resource Efficiency
Ingredients:
- A friend or a neighbor or a whole group of people (such as neighborhood affiliation or club or home association members)
- A list of possible ways to reduce inefficiency or waste of resources in your home. See workbooks* below or many other available lists such as:
Steps:
- Gather people together and/or start a shared blogging site (for example, see Friday Mornings at SELMA) to stay in touch about what you are working on.
- Decide on some shared actions or a theme like: community recycling, reducing your use of gasoline via shared appliances or car pools, reducing community use of electricity by installing electronic thermostats, or reducing water consumption.
- Meet once a month to share your experiences, difficulties, ideas, resources, and achievements related to environmental behaviors in your home. Collaborate, compare, exchange, help out, or even challenge each other – what changes have you made?
- Choose other actions or other recipes to do together.
You can design the sharing process yourself, or use one of the great, detailed step-by-step group workbooks or programs already out there like:
- Low Carbon Diet Teams
- 30-Day Program to Lose 5000 Pounds of Your Household’s Carbon Output
- Green Living Handbook (Household EcoTeam Program)
- 6 Step Program to Create An Environmentally Sustainable Lifestyle
- Home Free Energy: Offers Ann Arbor residents a “Weekend Parties” service of neighbors learning how to increase their homes’ efficiency together. As Jannette Lutz states “Herd your neighbors together for a Saturday or Sunday with us all going house-to-house, learning how we can get more energy efficient.” For more info contact: janette@HomeFreeEnergy.org
- The Transition Handbook by Rob Hopkins
- Transition Towns – Totnes: See how other communities are creating resilient, vibrant, and self-sustaining communities and get tips to begin the transformation of your own community!
