The former editor of the Devonshire Magazine is clearly interested in local business issues: Nigel Jones (@troutyeditor) / Twitter
Having also attended a session of the Town Council’s economy and tourism committee last year: Mins-TSM-140322.pdf
Three years ago, he launched an initiative:
From our research, we know that many, many organisations across the land (both commercial and charitable) are really keen to ensure they’re as sustainable as possible.
Currently, apart from grants for green purchases (solar panels, ground source heat, etc.), there is distinct lack of holistic sustainability help for organisations that want to do their bit towards helping fight the Climate Emergency.
When you consider that the SME business community alone numbers some 5.8 million businesses, you can imagine the magnitude of gains that could be made if they could be helped in their sustainability. Many smaller SMEs cannot afford £600-1000 a day in sustainability consultancy charges, or equally a sustainability manager (£35,000 p/a). The great pity here is that they really need and are desperate for help, but the barrier, particularly in this time of Covid, is purely money.
Our scheme is comprehensive and allied to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. In essence, it’s a task-based scheme that tackles all the appropriate subjects which come embedded in our ground-breaking EasyStep green-up software. It’s been a year and a half in development – devised particularly to help beleaguered SMEs that really want to be green, but just can’t afford it!
Proud to be Green – a Business crowdfunding project in Sidmouth by Nigel Jones
The crowdfunding initiative did not take off – but the concept is still very much out there:
Proud to be Green Complete Greening-up Solution – YouTube
And its business services are still very much available on the Exeter Chamber of Commerce website:
Proud to be Green’s mission is to help businesses and organisations to green-up.
We recognise that most organisations are already stretched and need genuine help to achieve this critical goal.
Where our organisation makes a definite contribution is with our out-of-the-box turnkey solution which removes needless admin and lost productivity.
Our solution has taken literally a year to develop, being finely honed, empowering organisations just to get on with the vital task of greening-up.
Our GAIA standards and reference information are only ever a click away within the groundbreaking software we’ve also developed, called EasyStep.