Brooklyn Stay Warm & Save Dollars

20 people including the steering group attended. All the steering group was present: Barbara, Belinda, Dawn, Tom (MC)

Tom gave an intro on Transition Towns and Brooklyn:

There’s been a lot of interest in Transition Towns in New Zealand in the last 18 months: we’re now up to 48 groups in New Zealand with 5 having obtained official Transition Town status.

Brooklyn’s one of the more active and successful groups and we’re in the process of applying for official Transition Town status.

We now have 2 subgroups in Brooklyn. One is the Gardening & Food group which has recently established a pilot ‘share-garden’: this is where a Brooklyn resident who is no longer able to do much gardening has volunteered her garden for other people to use. The Gardening & Food group is also working with Brooklyn school on re-establishing their school garden and has other plans including seed swaps and bulk food buying.

Our second subgroup is recently established and is dealing with transport issues.

We circulated our contact form on a clipboard to:

1. you can indicate if you’d like to volunteer for something
2. if you’d like to be added to our e-mail announcement list—generally one e-mail a week about Transition Town Brooklyn
3. if you’d like to join the food & gardening subgroup
4. if you’d like to join the transport subgroup

There’s no commitment on these, particularly the subgroups—you can just watch the e-mail list or turn up to meetings as you have the time.

Dawn talked more about individual's roles on the steering group and asked for interested candidates to see her.

Sarah Free, Energy Advisor from the Sustainability Trust spoke on ways we can save energy and reduce our power bills.

Andrew Smith, Renewable Energy Advisor from EECA talked about local options for renewable energy.

Sarah (Sustainability Trust) focused her presentation on the practical things that we can do to conserve energy. She brought lots of samples of bats and draft excluders and pictures of what a well insulated roof should look like.
Andrew (EECA) focussed primarily on energy generation, but again his message was 'rather than thinking of way to generate more energy we should be looking at ways to use less". With this in mind he had calculated the financial savings for the small actions we can take like fixing a dripping hot water tap (yes he has really done that).
The audience of around 20 people had lots and lots of questions to put to both our speakers. It was another great evening with lots of people staying behind to chat and share ideas.

Brilliant! Wish I'd gone... :)