Community Shares Practitioner Meet-up Oxford 2024

Our brilliant college of community shares practitioners meet online every six weeks to discuss interesting case studies and emerging practice across the UK. The online meet-ups are a great way to stay in touch but we all really value the opportunity to meet up at least once a year in person to get to know each other better and learn from some real life case studies. This year we travelled to Oxford and had tours and talks from Osney Lock Hydro, the Ultimate Picture Palace Community Cinema, Oxfordshire Community Land Trust and Flo’s Place in the Park. 

For those who couldn’t make it, this blog will share some of the highlights of the meet-up! 

We are human sundials 

Our meet-up started on sunny Tuesday evening with a wonderful tour and talk from Saskya Huggins, a Director of West Oxford Community Renewables and Low Carbon Hub. WOCORE are behind Osney Lock Hydro – the first community-owned hydro scheme on the River Thames. The initial surveys to develop the scheme started in 2001 and it was only 2015 when the Hydro was finally completed, and generation officially started. Due to the seriously admirable dedication from the team, in 2013 they were able to raise about £750,000 in community shares from 200 local investor members in just over a month. While we wouldn’t necessarily recommend planning a 12 year build up to a share offer launch, this is a great example of where the community of Osney island and surrounds were already 100% backing the project before the launch of the offer and took little to no persuasion once the opportunity finally arose! 

They sell the electricity they generate to the Environment Agency who are their direct neighbours and any surplus energy is exported into the grid and sold using a Power Purchase Agreement. The Archimedean screw is roofed with solar panels, generating on average 186,000kWh per year. The site is designed to be a welcoming, accessible and educational space, with the fish pass and beautiful mosaic human sundial celebrating all the local wildlife.  

A delicious dinner was shared at Lula’s Ethiopian and Eritrean Cuisine, based at the Community Works, a Makespace Oxford hub. We can highly recommend it! 

Lights! Community! Action! 

The next morning, we were delighted to be hosted by Micaela Tuckwell and Tom Jowett at the Ultimate Picture Palace Community Cinema. The Ultimate Picture Palace received Booster match funding for their share offer to preserve this iconic independent cinema with a wealth of history. They raised over £312,000 from 1290 investor members, about a third of whom came in at the minimum investment of £30 available for under 30s and those living in the immediate vicinity as well as some big hitter Oscar winning filmmakers supporting the campaign.  

Their approach to community engagement stands out, with over 40 volunteers managing the bar alongside the team in exchange for free cinema tickets. Micaela described the role of volunteers as ‘gold dust’ due to the value they add not just at the bar but in facilitating fascinating discussions and follow ups from the screenings. They have a specific anti-racism subgroup on the board and recently ran a very successful Sudanese film screening in partnership with the local Sudanese community.  

The UPP hosted their share offer on Ethex and provided additional resources to members of their community to navigate the process of making an account on Ethex and understanding the nature and risk of their community shares investment.  

Moving energy through space and time 

Next we heard from Saskya Huggins, this time with her Low Carbon Hub hat on. Low Carbon Hub were established in 2012 with a bold ambition to replace Didcot power station with renewables. Twelve years on, nine community share offers raising over £10m from 1773+ members later, they now have 55 renewable energy installations, 24 Megawatts of installed capacity and have generated over 19Giga Watt hours of green electricity!  

Saskya shared fascinating insights into the electricity system and the complexities of the aspirations for net zero due to increasing electrification. Specifically, the impact on the electricity distribution network, or ‘grid edge’ (the bit we all connect to) as we move away from fossil fuels for heating and transport, i.e. heat pumps and electric vehicles taking over from gas boilers and petrol cars. There is clearly a key role for community energy to play supporting an orderly and efficient transition to net zero at the grid edge.

She shared some words of wisdom to not try and take on too much early on and she credits some of Low Carbon Hub’s success to being able to focus primarily on energy generation and carbon cutting as the core mission in the early days. This has given them a strong base to develop other projects around shared ownership, the local distribution networks, retrofit, tackling fuel poverty, and storage solutions – also known as ‘moving energy not just through space but through time!’ 

Co-operation in community-led housing

We then heard from Mark Child, Director at Oxfordshire Community Land Trust. Oxfordshire CLT were set up in tackle the housing crisis in Oxfordshire, with their recent share offer the final piece in the jigsaw to complete the build of high quality, affordable, energy-efficient homes for eight families. They launched their offer in 2022, offering 3% just as Liz Truss came into office. Interest rates rose dramatically over the period of their share offer campaign which brought an unexpected uncertainty to the whole campaign, raising only 2% of their target in the first month. They took advice from the Ultimate Picture Palace on accessibility of the offer and had options for people to club together to meet the £250 minimum investment they had set. Despite great support from the Ethex platform, they also were very proactive in face to face meetings and events, going to the farmers markets, parish councils, local authorities, speaking to the media and grasping any opportunity to talk about the offer.  

Their model involves working closely with South Oxfordshire Housing Association and creating a tenants co-operative to empower tenants in the new housing development. They received some useful support from the Confederation of Co-operative Housing (CCH) training up the tenants and OCLT Directors on tenant co-opearation in action. 

Mark reflected on the role of CLTs to work alongside Housing Associations and where the CLT has been able to operate on a scale where they can be genuinely led by the local community and nimble in their decision making. They can generally punch above their weight compared to the financial might of Housing Associations and the wider private housing developers.  

Finding democracy in Flo's Place in the Park 

We took a leisurely walk through Oxford to Florence Park, home to Flo’s Place in the Park where we were met by Laura, Executive Director and Candi, Chair of the Charitable CBS. They ran a community share offer in 2018 and also received match equity investment through the Booster Fund. In the past five years, they have been busy, building trust in their community and responding to a range of identified needs around health, education, food, insecurity and environmental protection.   

Their site is a hive of activity, with forest schools for children, nature escapes for all ages, a bustling cafe and wholefoods and refill shop. They also run a midwifery clinic in partnership with the NHS and an ‘early lives’ programme for pregnant women and new parents predominently from ethnic minority backgrounds. They incubate other social enterprises on site, including Damascus Rose Kitchen who had provided absolutely delicious catering for our lunch at the Ultimate Picture Palace. They have also worked with Low Carbon Hub to install solar panels to reduce their carbon consumption and energy bills.  

We were very impressed by their capacity to actively listen to the community and respond on a variety of fronts, through partnerships and strong relationships. As we were there on election day, we were also thrilled to hear that the forest school kids were having their own election on which fruit to eat today. This week's vote was based on the first past the post voting system, with two year olds not allowed to vote and next week was going to the proportional representation with two year olds allowed to vote!