Sustainability Business Breakfasts – 2024
Below you will find details of business breakfasts running this year to help you take action towards improving your sustainability. This project is funded by the UK Government through the UK Shared Prosperity Fund with South Oxfordshire District Council as the lead authority. Breakfast is kindly sponsored by BP Collins Solicitors.
The UK Shared Prosperity Fund is a central pillar of the UK government’s Levelling Up agenda and provides £2.6 billion of funding for local investment by March 2025. The Fund aims to improve pride in place and increase life chances across the UK investing in communities and place, supporting local business, and people and skills. For more information, visit www.gov.uk/government/publications/uk-shared-prosperity-fund-prospectus.
Business Energy
Friday 17 May
9am – 10.30am
Thame Barns Centre, Church Rd, Thame OX9 3AJ
Energy and energy price rises have been much in the news. The government’s Energy Bills Discount Scheme, which was protecting business with a price cap from the worst of these rise, recently ended on 31 March 2024. The environmental impact of our fossil fuel energy use is also being felt closer to home, with more severe storms, flooding and summer heat extremes due to climate change.
If you want to reduce the energy you use, come to our Business Energy Breakfast on 17 May. The workshop will cover eliminating wasted energy, how to improve energy efficiency and which low carbon technologies are appropriate for small to medium sized businesses. There will be light touch solutions for those with little time or money and more impactful suggestions for businesses wanting a strategic planned approach to energy. Everyone will go away with practical steps that they can take to manage their energy better.
At the end of the workshop there will be an opportunity to apply for up to £1,000 of funding to part-cover the cost of a building energy assessment for your business, which will include a site visit and report.
The workshop will be delivered by two experts from Energy Solutions Oxfordshire (ESOx).
Helen Watts is a qualified engineer and energy assessor for the Environmental Information Exchange at Oxford Brookes University. Her career includes being an Environmental Champion in the automotive industry, putting up a wind turbine in a remote Soviet collective farm with no electricity, helping a local primary school reduce its energy use and installing solar panels and a heat pump in her own home.
Alison Grunewald has worked in sustainability for 23 years. As Business Relationships Manager at Low Carbon Hub, she led the £4.2M OxFutures project, which helped grow Oxfordshire’s low carbon economy. The project delivered building energy assessments and energy efficiency advice to 182 local businesses and resulted in average 19% energy savings and £2,500 financial savings per business. With BEIS funding, she set up Energy Solutions Oxfordshire in collaboration with Oxford Brookes EiE in 2020-21. This service has already resulted in £1.8M of investment in energy efficiency and renewable technologies. She is a qualified chartered surveyor.
Decarbonise your website
Friday 12 July
9am – 10.30am.
Thame Barns Centre, Church Rd, Thame OX9 3AJ
Did you know that Internet contributes to 3.7% of global carbon
emissions, more than aviation. (Eco-Friendly Web Alliance)
Come along to our business breakfast on 12 July to learn about how to decarbonise your business’s digital footprint, delivered by a local expert from Pentangle Technology Limited. Including:
- making your website use less carbon at a server level
- reducing the load on your user’s browser
- best practice sustainable web design.
It’s suitable for people at all levels of the business who have any involvement in their company website and will give you plenty of ideas to take away and implement.
Alun Rowe is a Web Developer with a wide background of expertise in IT systems and Business Development. He works with clients to achieve high quality, usable web/intranet services with ROI as a top objective. He also has many years of experience in delivering consultancy on IT Systems from software to hardware and especially in remote access/vpn/multiple site scenarios. He has worked with a wide variety of businesses from 1-5 person companies through to a variety of Blue Chip & NASDAQ clients.