A John Templeton Foundation “Scientists in Congregations grant” in 2015 helped us raise awareness and convinced us that we had something more to offer community buildings, but at the time energy costs weren’t such a concern for them as they are now, and climate change was still something of a niche interest. That was starting to change in 2022, so we had a reboot, with the Royal Academy of Engineering giving us the backing we needed to launch our main programme with the help of around 40 volunteer engineers that we recruited with the help of Engineers without Borders UK, and with The Surefoot Effect CIC acting as our “incubator”.
In 2024, our founder won the Church Times “Green Champion” award, sponsored by Stewardship, for her work on the programme. This gave us £1000 to work with at a critical time when we needed to transition to having our own independent organisation.
Since then, we have had funding from the Glasgow City Heritage Trust to pilot our heating controls checks with 7 Glasgow listed churches; delivered a training and community networking project jointly with Greener Kirkcaldy that was funded by the University of St Andrews Community Fund; and had small grants (under £500) or trading income from a wide range of sources to deliver training workshops across Scotland.
Over the years we have also had small bits of help from the University of Edinburgh’s Schools of Engineering and Informatics in the form of loans and donations of equipment, as well as the opportunity to co-supervise master’s students to explore heating and heat loss in community buildings and contribute software development and design skills. Similarly, the University of St Andrews has gifted us the time of paid software interns.
Partners
The Scottish Episcopal Church has adopted the main HeatHack programme as part of their Net Zero initiative, encouraging their churches to undertake a lightly adapted version of it tailored to their policies. We work with them when we develop new offerings relevant to churches and provide a fallback for some kinds of expertise.
Some staff at major funders of community building retrofits refer enquirers to us if they feel that they will receive a stronger proposal as a result, but we do not have a formal relationship with them.
We are currently working towards partnerships in some regions that will allow us to attract the funding to serve more beneficiaries. If you are interested in working with us on this, please get in touch.