Developing resilient communities
We believe having stronger communities can do many things, including making building retrofit and improvement better.
Our theory of resilient community development is that working at increasing levels of community trust can help us work towards a better environment. As individuals collaborate and create structured groups they gain access to more solutions and more sources of funding, become viable for contractors, benefit from economies of scale, increase accessibility to improvements for those who can't take on projects individually, and increase the quality of work that can be done.
Not only that, but with increasing levels of community organisation and activity, other things can happed such as sharing libraries, car clubs, communal food growing, green-space management, community asset management, and community energy systems.
This progression towards more resilient communities can be entered at any level, and your community may be at different levels with different initiatives at the same time. Our member communities show how energy efficiency improvements can be just one part of better homes and neighbourhoods.
The benefits of working collaboratively
Working collaboratively at community-scale can offer many advantages to householders, including:
Being able to use highly skilled, qualified, and insured professionals for assessment and design, getting better technical results for lower individual cost, as a result of economies of scale. They prefer bigger projects (which needs collectivising, which needs the Collective!).
Enabling retrofit work to be accessible for those who are disadvantaged in any way such that they are unable or unwilling to take on a project on their own (and there are a considerable number of good reasons why this may be the case).
Retrofit and improvement being technically better for tenement or flatted buildings when they are treated as a whole.
Bigger carbon and cost-savings from larger projects, with more positive impact on the climate and ecological emergencies.
Developing stronger and more resilient communities by working together, using the win-win experience of collaborative community-led retrofit work as a catalyst to inspire projects for wider improvements in community quality of life.
Having designers involved in larger projects means contractors will see such work as a market they want to be involved in. There is a huge need for more professionals and contractors to train and to focus on domestic retrofit.
A move to collaborative project working – with connection-making between professionals and groups of householders aided by an intermediary like the Collective – will help develop the market by making it simpler to access and more attractive.