As RWE publishes its 2022 Community Funding Report, Katy Woodington, RWE Community Investment Manager, explains why she’s proud of the work RWE is doing to make a real impact in local communities.
This includes our highly skilled workforce, the people developing innovative solutions as part of our supply chain, and the young people signing up to RWE apprenticeship or graduate opportunities.
This people-focussed approach also extends to how we support the communities living closest to our renewable energy projects.
Our wind farm projects across the UK & Ireland have an associated community fund. This is an amount of money invested into an agreed area of benefit linked to the location of the wind farm or, for some offshore projects, the onshore infrastructure or cable route. In many cases this is made available each year of the operational lifetime of the project, and index-linked in line with inflation. All of the funding is invested locally, with support provided by a locally based fund administrator and local people in the driving seat when it comes to decisions about how this money is invested.
For the last 16 years I have been leading RWE’s community investment activity across the UK & Ireland, much of which is directed though our community fund portfolio.
My background in the voluntary sector has helped me to understand first-hand the challenges faced by community projects, as well as the potential value that RWE can add, be it unlocking additional budget, discovering and addressing local funding gaps, or even supporting communities to realise their innovative ideas.
RWE have already invested more than £33 million into local communities living closest to our projects. Whilst RWE is a major global player in the energy industry, which brings investment, skills and experience needed to deliver major infrastructure projects, our community funds are all about a local approach. They are not about us making decisions for local people but they are an opportunity for us to listen to what is important in the different areas we work in and understand how our funding can be best used to support local people to achieve their ambitions.
Local decision making and direction is at the heart of everything our community funds do, with each fund guided by a panel of local individuals who actively participate in decision-making, driving and shaping the future direction of our initiatives.
Throughout the years, we have crafted a highly flexible model that empowers these local panels to adapt and respond to evolving circumstances, emergencies, and opportunities, ensuring the funds are delivered in a way that works best for their local area.
I am consistently amazed at the scale of what our funding can achieve, but this too revolves around people. Many of the projects that we have supported have been imagined, developed and driven by volunteers. It is their energy, enthusiasm and commitment that ensures the funding generates long term sustainable change for their local area.
In our latest quarterly round up, one of the projects we highlighted was from our Clocaenog Forest Onshore Wind Farm Fund in North Wales. Recruiting and bringing a fund panel together is always challenging, but here the Covid 19 pandemic made this even harder.
It was a really long time before the panel of local people were able to meet in person, making it even more difficult than usual for them to build relationships with each other as well as their confidence in grant making.
It is inspiring therefore to see this panel move from early discussions about themes and criteria to supporting bigger and more challenging projects like the local community pub project we featured in our round up. They are really starting to take control of the exciting funding opportunity, discussing the longer term and potential legacy of the fund and thinking about how it could address some of their most pressing local issues such as affordable housing and other ways to enable families and young people to stay in the area.
It's exciting to see them at the start of this journey and their story is just one example of the many funds we have all over the UK.
As our operational portfolio gains momentum, poised to generate more than £100 million in community funds throughout its lifetime, and with a whole host of exciting projects on the horizon, we are witnessing just the start of the transformative power that our wind farm projects can unleash within local communities nationwide.
total number of grants
contributed to community funds
jobs created
smallest grant
largest grant
education & training opportunities created