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Our Community Transport scheme has been recognised at the recent Community Transport Association Conference when Awel Aman Tawe/ Taith was announced as Winner of the Commitment to Sustainability Award and finalist for the 2023 Photo Competition. Our Community Transport manager Sachá Petrie was also finalist for the Champion of the Year award. She was guest speaker at the conference in a session on Innovation in Community Transport: “Innovation is not just digital: Thinking Outside the Box in the Delivery of CT Services“.  It is great to see the Taith team’s hard work recognised.
Thank you CTA for a wonderful day. Congratulations to all the winners in the other categories.

We need you!
Do you have any spare time to become a volunteer driver for community transport?  We attend medical appointments, shopping and social events.  If you are interested, please contact taith@awel.coop

These past two terms Jen, our Education Officer, has been delivering our We are Energy Warriors programme with seven primary schools in Pembrokeshire. There was a distinct creative and circular economy flavour to this season’s work! Pupils have been learning about their energy use via Energy Sparks, taking part in renewable energy experiments with Ynni Da and sharing their messages to reduce energy through rapping and designing murals with Mr Phormula and Sion Tomos Owen. Other pupils have been learning that we can save energy through paying careful attention to the clothes we buy and the food we eat. Our Energy Warriors have been raising awareness about waste through making new clothes from old with the artist Nia Lewis, foraging and natural dying with the amazing Sian Lester making bagushions (combined bags and cushions!), and planting, growing, harvesting and cooking with the talented forest school Child of the Earth.  

Schools have also been involved in our STEM programme. In Newport, Egni primary schools have hosted ‘Reimagine Energy’ with Dr Sarah-Jane Potts. Sarah-Jane has been touring schools to inspire future engineers through energy-generating playground equipment. Pupils created a lego playground to make energy! Swansea University has also led a battery coin experiment with our energy warriors, and pupils have met STEM Ambassadors from Blue Gem Wind, Tata Steel and Pembrokeshire Coastal Forum. They even met a polar explorer who told them all about his expedition to Antarctica.

Jen is currently working with the artist Ami Marsden and youth theatre group Mess up the Mess to deliver a new programme called Our Sensory Story of Energy . This is now in full swing bringing together pupils in Penyrheol Comprehensive School and Ysgol Crug Glas to bring energy to life using waste and recycling to tell our very special story of energy.

We were delighted to hear that Egni Co-op received the Highly Commended Award for Community Energy Organisation of the Year 2023 by Community Energy England. Having recently won the tender to install solar panels on approximately 20 schools & leisure centres in Pembrokeshire County Council, we are excited at how seriously community energy is being taken by many councils in south Wales. Mike, Rosie and Ellie – our Egni team – continue to work hard across Wales, currently assessing sites with an additional 1MW capacity for rooftop solar. Sites, like the Gwent Crematorium, Fishguard Leisure Centre, St. Joseph’s School, Wastesavers among others are all at various stages of design and installation.
Mike, pictured below receiving the award, is also carrying out Energy Surveys and acting as a mentor through the EGIN programme for a number of community energy projects as we seek to support others in the drive to tackle the climate crisis.  A recent energy survey of Bloomfield Community Centre in Pembrokeshire has resulted in a £20k grant towards LED lighting upgrades, a more energy efficient heating system and a solar PV array to help them with rising energy costs and lowering their carbon footprint.

The Hwb Stitch Club grew out of our Heritage Quilt project which was run by sustainable stitch specialist Menna Buss of Iar Stiwdio and the talented members of the Tawe Guild of Weavers, Spinners and Dyers (funded by the Arts Council for Wales). During the project over 300 participants made an incredible quilt using low carbon materials and techniques and remembers the school and the local area. We celebrated its completion with a great party and it will be on permanent display in the café of Hwb y Gors when we open. Since then, the Stitch Club has been meeting every fortnight to support each other but also to lend their skills to support other groups – including Awel Aman Tawe! – Warrior capes for our climate education programme (We are Energy Warriors), Wiggly Vests* for local charity Joseph’s Smile, costumes for their community Christmas shows and now aprons for our volunteers. Thank you all at Stitch Club!

Stitch Club takes place on the 1st & 3rd Tuesday of every month in Cwmgors Community Hall, SA18 1PS (10-12.30). The group meets with their own projects, they have a cuppa, a chat and a giggle! – if this sounds appealing, get in touch with Sandra on sandrarobbs@hotmail.com

*Wiggly Vests were designed by charity founder, Katy Yeandle.  The vests are designed to support children who require Hickman Lines while being treated for Cancer. These enable them to play without pulling the lines out & consequently needing hospital admissions.

We’re going to be 1 year old in February!

On February 22^nd 2023, with support from Repair Café Wales, we ran our first Repair Café in Cwmgors Community Hall and we haven’t looked back! We’ve been running one every month and support for it has been growing. The ethos of a repair cafe is to repair and reuse, minimising what ends up in landfill.  Volunteer fixers offer their time and skills and when visitors come in with repairs, they are welcomed by hosts, offered a cup of tea and introduced to a fixer who can usually repair their broken item.

We have a great team of volunteer fixers from the community, and some funding from Pobl Trust for tools and equipment so it’s become such a buzzing community event that Welsh Government have featured us in their film! (Welsh version is here) Why not come along and bring something that needs repairing, or even come and help fix or host at one of our repair cafes? We’re very friendly and would love to see you!

Last year we held an extra-ordinary repair café in the local Primary school YGG Gwaun Cae Gurwen.  Working with the pupils’ Eco Council, it focused on school uniform repairs with a few soft toys and the odd pencil case thrown in!  The children were amazing, embracing the ethos of the Repair Café and made brilliant hosts!  The 3 fixers worked tirelessly for the 2 hours, mending 27 out of the 28 items we saw!

The Repair Café group have also been involved in a global meeting of repair cafés (the Fix Fest) to share ideas and learn new skills.  We met repairers from as far afield as Toronto! Overall, the feeling was that to repair is normal, it’s what people always used to do and we need to do this more again to reduce landfill and to support wellbeing and community.

We have also started offering mini free workshops at our repair cafe including IT support, machine sewing skills and bike maintenance so if you’d like join those do get in touch so we can let you know when the next workshops will be.

Sadly, we are saying goodbye (for now!) to the incredible Jo.  She has been invaluable to the repair café, not only as a textiles fixer but Jo can turn her hand to anything it seems, fixing wooden trays, teapots, jars, cake stands, picnic blankets, teddy bears and of course, she is the Queen of Darning!

Wednesday 28th February,10am-1pm. (Last Wednesday of every month).
Location: Cwmgors Community Hall, Cemetary Road, SA18 1PS.

It’ll be our 1st birthday on Wednesday 28th February 2024 so do pop in for a fix!

Coming up this spring, we have a number of free workshops designed to de-mystify gardening, growing, foraging & cooking with your produce! 

Foraging with Alicja Domanska-Kurec. February 15th 10am-1pm: A local walk to forage for edible and medicinal plants, then learn how to use what you find.

Wild Kitchen Workshops with Alicja Domanska-Kurec: February 15th and March 2nd 2.30-5.30pm. How to cook with garden and wild plants.

Spring Seed Swap. 2nd March 10am-1pm: Bring seeds to swap – seeds you’ve collected, been given or bought. Hear from BBC Radio Wales’ Gardening Expert Liz Zorab

We will be running plenty of other workshops in the near future with: the Orchard Project on caring for fruit trees, with Liz Zorab on food growing, with Coed Lleol/Small Woods and with the Initative for Nature Conservation Cymru

Our nature and gardening group have been really busy this year creating an abundance of produce.  They’ve shared recipes and cooking tips, given plenty of surplus vegetables to the local food back and are busy planning the garden for the coming year. Members of the group attended workshops in Soft Fruit Gardening and Propagation with BBC Radio Gardening expert, Liz Zorab. We were also joined by the brilliant Bryan Collis of  Wild Plant Paper who led 2 very enjoyable workshops on how to make paper from plants. We’re sure many people received some beautiful Christmas cards this year! In December, to round up the year, Krys Toombs ran 2 workshops to make porcelain Christmas Decorations in which 40 people made over 600 decorations! We had a wonderful Christmas celebration hosted by the GCG Silver band and we all decorated our new living Christmas trees generously donated by Coed Nadolig Perthigwynion. The Christmas trees will be planted at Hwb y Gors, cared for by the garden group and will grow as we grow!

As well as the recently awarded Shared Prosperity Fund grant to landscape the yard, we are delighted to have been awarded grants from the National Grid Community Matters Fund, Tai Tarian, NPT Food Partnership and NPT Local Places for Nature. We’ve also had trees from the Woodland Trust, and a food growing development pack from Keep Wales Tidy. The landscaping will include gardens, trees, recreation spaces and seating across the back. We have purchased much needed equipment for the garden group & we’re putting together an exciting programme of workshops for 2024. Do keep an eye on our facebook page or get in touch with Louise if you’d like to get involved and or book your place on the workshops

Here are some pictures of the garden:

We were excited to hear last week that we have been successful in securing funding from NPT Council’s Shared Prosperity Fund for creating a sustainable drainage system and landscaping across the yard at the back of Hwb y Gors. This will take place this year once we’ve put together a schedule of works. And inside, our builders have been hard at work during 2023. Although the renovation has taken a lot longer than we had hoped, we feel it will be worth the wait. Here’s a few pictures of the building inside. With our new sprung floor and gallery in the hall, and our Changing Places room with hoist and adult changing bed, we’re really excited at how the building is taking shape. We’ve done our best to preserve and recreate some of beautiful features of the building like the internal windows, fireplaces, hall beams and curved plasterwork as well as the amazing entrance stone work. We feel so strongly that the 110 years of school memories live on in the building.

The next steps are: to fit out the cafe, lay the flooring throughout and landsape the yard with the sustainable drainage system (SUDs). Sustainable drainage aims to retain water on site for as long as possible rather than putting it all down the main drains which causes flooding & other problems further down the valley. The system will also take rainwater from the roof and divert it to water the garden and flush the toilets.

Once all this is done, we’ll be ready to finally open the doors to Hwb y Gors!  In case you missed it, here’s a short video made by Mike Harrison about what’s happening at Hwb y Gors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zr95N5yCYQ

2023 was a year to celebrate all of our brilliant & invaluable volunteers.  From the trustees of Awel Aman Tawe to the Repair Cafe, the Garden Club, the Stitch Club, all the teas & coffees at events, raising our profile at the Brynaman Park Run (see photo with Welsh Rugby Captain, Jac Morgan), as well as unloading donated furniture from Orangebox lorries (thank you Orangebox)!  In 2023 alone, our volunteers clocked up over 1400 hours – a huge thank you to you all, for every minute you gave us & the local community! In June, this hard work was recognised by Neath Port Talbot Council for Voluntary Service when our volunteers were awarded Winners of the Environment Award! 

Do get in touch if you would like to get involved!

First up is a new Administrator post who will help us manage all our office systems and support the move into Hwb y Gors, our new net zero arts, community and enterprise centre in Cwmgors in the Upper Swansea Valley which will be opening in Spring 2024. Full job description and application details here.

We’ve also got two renewable energy jobs to help develop more rooftop solar with Egni Co-op (we’re currently gearing up to start installs on 16 schools and 4 leisure centres with Pembrokeshire Council); a ground mount solar project next to our wind turbines on the Gwrhyd; more wind turbines; and lots of other exciting projects – details of the senior job are here and the officer post here. These jobs are funded through the Welsh Government Energy Service. If you’re interested in applying, please review the job description and person specification and send your application (Covering Letter and CV) to croeso@awel.coop.

We’re also got two Energy Advisor jobs who will be working with local householders in the Upper Amman and Swansea Valleys on energy efficiency improvements and domestic renewables. Full training is available.

Pembrokeshire County Council has awarded a contract for the installation of rooftop solar panels on 20 local schools and leisure centres to Welsh social enterprise, Egni Co-op.

It’s estimated that the solar panels will prevent the emission of approximately 200 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year and should save the schools and leisure centres £180,000 per year in energy costs.

The systems should have an operational life of well over 30 years, and the contract aims to install over 1MW of solar PV on the schools and leisure centres over the next 18 months. 

Photo: Golden Grove Primary, Pembs

Steve Keating, the Council’s Energy and Sustainability Team Manager, said the scheme is an example of thinking differently.

“By securing outside capital investment from a social enterprise this solar power project offers the Council all the carbon savings along with major savings on operational expenditure for zero capital cost to the Council,” he said.

“The procurement model also ensures that local schools will receive excellent educational support on renewable energy and climate change topics.

“At the same time the scheme supports the ambitions of a community energy cooperative thus allowing a social enterprise to roll out further renewable energy projects in other locations and retaining as much of the supply chain benefit as possible within Wales.” 

A key part of the tender is a linked educational programme to engage schools in Pembrokeshire, alongside Sustainable Schools Pembrokeshire, to help tackle climate change. Egni’s Education Programme is called ‘We are Energy Warriors’ and has been developed by their Education Officer, Jen James.

A video featuring activities undertaken by the six existing primary schools with Egni solar panels in Pembrokeshire can be seen at Energy Rappers video on YouTube.  

Egni already works in partnership with the Energy Sparks charity who have developed an excellent energy data platform to support schools in reducing their carbon footprint and save money. 

The average Energy Sparks primary has saved at least £3,000 off their energy bill over the last year and 12.8 tonnes of CO2, the average secondary has saved at least £12,000 and 48 tonnes of CO2.    

At present, Egni and its principal contractor Ice Solar are undertaking further feasibility checks on all the sites and working with National Grid before agreeing final installs with the Council. As sites are installed, they will be publicised via Pembrokeshire County Council and Egni’s media channels.

Dan McCallum, Awel Aman Tawe and Egni Co-op Director said: “We are delighted to be working with the Council and with children and teachers in Pembrokeshire schools.

“We all need to work together to tackle climate change – as a cooperative that is ingrained in our model.

“We’ve also been supported by the Welsh Government Energy Service which has been crucial to our development.

“We’d like to thank Pembrokeshire for their innovative approach in terms of procurement – this is one of the first examples we believe of a Council in Wales awarding a large contract to a social enterprise like us.

“We are now focused on providing clean power and saving as much money as possible for schools and leisure centres in Pembrokeshire. Going forward, we want this co-operative approach to be seen as a case study in how to best tackle climate change.” 

Egni Co-op and Clynfyw Care Farm are delighted to announce the commissioning of a 32.8 kWp solar system.

Jim Bowen, Director of Clynfyw said, We are so happy with the solar system which was installed by a local company, Preseli Solar. All costs were funded by Egni Co-op. Clynfyw has always taken action on tackling climate change and installing the solar system is part of that journey. It’s great to be working in partnership with a co-op to achieve that. As electricity costs have gone up such a lot, the panels will save us money as we’re paying Egni Co-op 60% less per kWh compared to our main supplier – this reduces our running costs and enables us to continue our work more sustainably.”

The Care Farm supports adults with learning difficulties and those recovering from mental unwellness. Clynfyw Care Farm is a Community Interest Company located near the village of Boncath in Pembrokeshire.It uses meaningful projects as tools for learning, engagement, contribution and fun through a farm-based Day Service and supporting people living in the Clynfyw Farm Cottages. They also manage the Kinora mental health recovery centre in Cardigan. Clynfyw have won multiple awards for their work including the Queen’s Award for Enterprise (sustainable development) in 2020.

Clynfyw is home to ten people living in supported tenancy and provides inspiring opportunities for 45 vulnerable people, over 200 times each week, and secure, enjoyable employment for 42 paid staff and volunteers. They have shared their experience with others and have written a book ‘Care Farming for Beginners – a how to Guide’.

Jim added “Yesterday, the whole site was powered by the sun from 7.30am till 8pm, with no power being imported from the grid. We saved 115 kg of CO2 was saved in a single day. And it’s green and on our roof!”

Michael Switzer, Operations Manager at Egni Co-op said “We were honoured to be approached by Jim to install solar here. Clynfyw is one of those truly inspirational organisations in Wales. The quality of their work is clear from talking to the people who come each day and those who live on site.”

Notes for Editor:

Awel Aman Tawe (AAT) / Egni Co-op

AAT is a community energy charity which has been operating for 21 years. It was created by local people in the Upper Amman and Swansea Valleys, a former coal mining area 20 miles north of Swansea. Our prime drivers are tackling climate change, job creation, retaining wealth in the Welsh economy and engaging people in energy. We have a strong reputation for delivery of education, arts and engagement. We have set up two co-ops:

• Awel Co-op, is a 4.7MW community wind farm which was commissioned in Jan 2017. It was funded by a £5.25m loan from Triodos Bank and a £3m community share offer. www.awel.coop

• Egni Co-op develops rooftop solar on schools, businesses and community buildings. It has installed nearly 5 MWp on 90 sites in Wales.  It’s now the largest rooftop solar co-op in the UK. Egni has raised £5m from a community share offer and £2.12m from the Development Bank of Wales to fund the installs which are ongoing. Egni has been actively supported by the Welsh Government Energy Service. We saved our sites more than £120k in electricity costs in 2022 and 1,000 tonnes in carbon emissions. All surplus goes into energy education projects in schools, working in partnership with EnergySparks www.egni.coop

Over 80 local community organisations and schools are also members of Awel and Egni Co-ops, owning more than £100k of shares, gaining a sustainable income stream from the projects. We have over 1,500 members of our two renewable energy co-ops. In 2019, Awel Aman Tawe was recognised as Environmental Organisation of the Year in the UK Social Enterprise Awards.

Clynfyw Farm

Clynfyw Farm is a 395 acre organic farm and woodland in North Pembrokeshire that has been farmed by the Lewis-Bowen family since the 1750s. Since 1985, it has offered high-quality accessible accommodation in converted Victorian farm buildings. It also hosts weddings, conferences and a variety of courses based around the environment, sustainability and disability access. The majority of the farmland is rented to an organic farmer, Hefyn Evans, and the CIC uses about 12 acres for its care farming  work.

Pembrokeshire County Council has been using Clynfyw’s cottages for respite stays for its Learning Disability team since 2009 with care support provided by a number of different registered domiciliary care providers.