Some of the churches in our programme ganged together to nominate our programme lead, Jean Carletta, for a Church Times Green Award, and she won it! We’re very honoured and grateful – this will help us help more people.
The Church Times Green Church Awards
The churches chose the “Green Champion” category, which is for an individual. Being considered at all is one of the things that stunned us most. All the other categories are for churches and Christian charities, but we’re part of a secular Community Interest Company. Jean wrote the programme with churches in mind because that’s what she knows best, and it’s most popular with churches, but it’s for everyone who runs community buildings. We’re delighted that the church community considers us part of the fold, because that’s one of Jean’s hidden aims: secular community groups and churches may sometimes use different language, but our hearts are in the same place. Especially in the current times, we are all in this together, and we have common cause. We need to learn and work together.
The awards ceremony was held in London, and we were surprised to discover that people there had heard of us, as we only supported a handful of churches outside Scotland. There was a group from Bristol at our table who even had a copy of our card game. We have no idea who could have sent it to them – it wasn’t us! We met many inspiring people involved in very impressive projects, and some who will be able to help us improve the advice we give and make links into new UK regions. That’s hugely valuable for us as we plan out how we build on what we’ve done so far.
Lastly, we can’t tell you how grateful we are to both the Royal Academy of Engineering’s Ingenious programme for getting us started, to the volunteer engineers that have been helping us develop and deliver it, and to the sponsor of the Green Champion Award, Stewardship, for the prize money of £1000 they have donated. That means we don’t have to think about how to bring in money for the basics like email, the website, printing, and thermal monitoring just now – we can concentrate on what we want to do next. Thank you, and we’ll do our best to make good with the gifts we’ve been given.