September 2019

Doddiscombsleigh Parish Council declared a Climate Emergency and setup a working group to research what people in the local community can do.

 

November 2019

The Working Group had its first public event in the School. More than 40 people  attended the Tea, Cake and Climate Action Event and expressed their views about the issue.

If you would like to be involved in the work of the Group or you missed the original talk then please contact Elliott Fairs on fairselliott@hotmail.com

 

December 2019

An email from Elliott Fairs, member of the Parish Council's Climate Emergency Working Group and organizer of the Teign Valley Hub about the latest news:

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Hello All,

Firstly apologies not not having been in contact for such a long time with news on where we go next following the last meeting we had in Doddi at the start of November. 

 

To bring you all up to speed on the things that have been going on since our meeting I have listed all of the various things and outlined each a bit.

 

Please take 5 minutes to have a read of this and hopefully you will find something that you would like to learn more about or get involved with.  Please also feel free to forward this to anyone else you may know that you feel may like to get involved further.

 

Hustings – A Hustings was organised where all of the candidates for all parties were invited to a Q&A specifically on the Climate Emergency.  Questions were pulled together by volunteers and Action for Climate in Teignbridge (ACT).  Candidates from Newton Abbott ward as well as Central Devon (our ward).  Questions were put to them abut how they planned to tackle climate breakdown, encourage more use of public transport, reduces CO2 emissions as well as ways in which they felt we could improve our building standards and head towards CO2 neutral homes.  Candidates from Labour, Lib Dems and Greens all turned up but there were no representatives from the Conservatives who did not respond to the invitations.  There were about 200 people in the audience.

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Future Homes Policy – The government is currently holding a consultation on the building standards by which future homes should be built.  Working alongside other volunteers from ACT, we are currently striving to have all new homes built to what is called PassiveHaus standards or otherwise CO2 neutral.  There are many ways in which this can be achieved, and this would be an amazing thing to achieve and have implemented by whichever Government moves forward into 2020.

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Dunsford CE – We have been working with Dunsford Parish Council to help them put together a proposal for their own Parish to declare a Climate Emergency (CE) and I am pleased to say they declared theirs on 4th December

Trusham CE - We have been working with Trusham Parish Council to help them put together a proposal for their own Parish to declare a CE) and I am pleased to say they declared theirs at the start of December. 

Christow. Bridford CE - We have been working with both Bridford and Christow Parish Council’s to help them put together proposals for their own Parish’s to declare CE’s.  Bridford are yet to meet officially to discuss this as a Council.  Christow discussed it at their December meeting but asked for more time to review the information so the decision was postponed until January 2020.

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National Lottery Grant Bid – We have submitted a bid to the National Lotteries special one-off grant fund which marks its 25th birthday.  The grant fund is for £1000 and a decision will be made in January 2020 by a National Lottery panel.  If successful we will be using the funds to host a series of events whereby food and drink will be catered for and hall hire, and volunteer expenses will be covered.  The 6 events spread between March and November 2020 will focus on bring people from within the parishes in the Teign Valley together and discuss ways in which we can reduce our impact on the planet and take action to slow down Climate Breakdown.  Events will cover a Cinema event showcasing the new film 2040, a repair café, a local food and growing workshop, a wildlife gardening and open gardens event, an energy information exchange/workshop and a community tree planting day.  Fingers crossed its successful.

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Teign Climate Hub set up – A community group has become established covering the parishes within Teign Valley.  The group have now met 4 times and is made up of about 20 people.  The group meet in the evenings at Woodah Farm and their next meeting is 9th January 19;30.  To date we have focused on what we as a community group can do and how we can all help one another achieve better results.  If you do one thing, I would urge people to come along to one of these meetings.  Everyone is lovely, and the feeling is very positive, if a little concerned about the Climate.  From this group many positive things have spun off including the National Lottery Bid and the following other things:

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• Green Friday event - a Green Friday event was held on ‘Black Friday’ whereby people brought with them good quality items which they no longer wanted and ‘swapped’ them with other items brought by other people.  Mulled wine was drunk and Bob Dylan’s Christmas album was listened too and people just generally chatted. The aim of the event was social and to reduce our consumption of buying new things so both boxes were ticked.

• Events Programme – A draft event programme covering the next 12 months has been drafted and dates are now being firmed up.  All of the events listed as part of the National Lottery Bid came from this list and many others are also on their including a picnic at Woodah Farm in the orchard when in full blossom, hedge laying days, barn owl talks, bat walks, recycling workshops, green energy classes and a carbon footprint reduction talk.

 

• Teign Climate Hub Facebook page launched – The Climate Hub group have set up a Facebook group where people can share and forward relevant and interesting articles related to the Climate Emergency.  Events are advertised via Facebook and people are posting great ideas as to how to make little changes in their lives.  If you are on Facebook, please do look up this group and join it, it is actually one of the more interesting things I see on Facebook nowadays.

 

• Teign Valley Skills and Labour Swap FB group established – This group has just been set up and launched in the hope of encouraging people to share and swap skills.  The hope is that transactions can be made via swapping one another’s time and skills to get tasks done by people who subsequently then become friends.  As somebody who benefits from labour exchanges with various people it is a great way of getting rather large jobs done very quickly.  Have a look and post on it what you are looking for and perhaps what you can offer.

 

• Parish Magazines – Articles have now been written for the local Parish Mags and will be submitted on a monthly basis updating people on what has been going on as well as promoting upcoming events and trying to draft more people to join the growing community.

 

Carbon Footprint Evening Talk with Audrey Compton – An evening talk has been arranged for late January at Dunsford Village Hall, where Audrey Compton, a local farmer from Trusham and a key volunteer with ACT, will be talking about the CE and what we can all do to help prevent this breakdown from occurring.  Please do try to come along to see what more you may be able to do, if not just to meet people and hear what others are doing.

 

Talks have been had with the Head of School at Doddiscombsleigh School to discuss how we can go about incorporating the Climate and the problems it faces into the Schools learning more.  I am yet to hear how the meeting went so hope to be able to update you more sooner.

 

Looking ahead, we have talked about how best to set up groups that can focus on specific areas of the CE.  At the Doddi meeting I mentioned the idea of setting up working groups within Doddi Parish.  Having given it much more thought and spoken to many other people in neighbouring parishes I feel that it would be much better for us to set up individual working groups across the Teign Parishes rather than each Parish act individually.  I hope that we will start to get members of the Teign Climate Hub stepping forward to act as lead co-ordinators for each separate working group and then start to arrange specific meetings to start focusing in on these.  As and when any dates are known I will try to send these out.

 

Best wishes

Elliott