Green Dragon's Den Winners
Wednesday, June 9, 2010 at 5:44AM Last week's Hay on Earth Sustainability Workshops at the Hay Festival saw 25 short listed candidates pitch their best ideas to a panel of dragons and members of the public to win one of four £10,000 prizes that were up for grabs through the Welsh Assembly's Sustainble Development Challenge Fund.
The winners were:
Low carbon travel - B-Bug. Prototype electric vehicles, intended to wean visitors in the Brecon Beacons National Park out of their 4x4s and mobile homes into something quiet and eco-friendly that's powered by renewable electricty from local hydro schemes.
Food Agriculture - Schools Farmers' Markets. A delightful project that is setting up farmers' markets in schools (mostly primary) that are self-sustaining once established, with the proceeds coming back to the school.
Business & Enterprise - Green Valleys Cash Cow. This already successful project bid for funding to expand their reach from the planned 20 projects to hundreds in communities across Wales, generating as much as £72m over 20 years through the feed in tariff.
Community & Housing - SEED House. A low-carbon, locally sourced demonstration project, to be build at the Centre for Alternative Technology at Machynlleth, using simple replicable timber frame and high levels of insulation.
Our next steps are to post the reports from each of the Hay workshops online, which we'll be doing in the next couple of days, tighten the 'R10' real change targets into micro-projects, and then start spreading sparky, clear ideas wherever we can.
Reader Comments (2)
CASH COW?? (business as usual then?)
I am unsure how providing further support for existing projects from NGOs, Universities and LAs exactly meet the requirements of the SD Challenge Fund.
While theARCproject was NOT shortlisted I would be interested to know who was!
Are you able to publish a FULL list of ALL project applications received, as well as the ones shortlisted? - with contact details and project brief - this may allow for 'best practice' skill sharing and knowledge transfer to take place!
Hay, this may even be a better use of 40k (ie. Providing an Open Access Forum for Sustainable Development Initiatives)
Also, I noticed the distinct lack of public awareness and media attention devoted to Hay on Earth. In fact WAGs SD Charter didn't even get the publicity it should have done.
If this SD process is to work, we must ALL Think Differently - not to mention ACT Locally.
How funny. It's all about the ARK (or ARC) these days.
We (ARK LAB) also submitted a proposal related to social innovation and creativity. We didn't get short-listed and if we were fully honest we didn't 100% expect as we are relatively new.
We appreciated the opportunity to submit and fully understand that sometimes a more established project from an existing organisation can make the necessary impact visible to the public.
You'll be glad to know we are still doing our non-funded, not for profit, 100% volunteer in-between-the-day-job projects. :)
Our first empty shop project kicks of next week too... www.thinkark.co.uk