Empowering Communities with Circular Opportunities (ECCO)

Funder: Government of Ireland, through the Department of Environment, Climate Action and Communications

Duration of Project: September 2022 – September 2025 (36 Months)

Lead on Project: Rediscovery Centre

Partners and Collaborators: EDI Longford, Roscommon Women’s Network, Tait House Enterprise Centre, Limerick

Status: Open

About:

Through this project, the Rediscovery Centre in collaboration with Tait House Community Enterprise, EDI Longford, and Roscommon Women’s Network, aims to empower and build capacity within communities to develop new circular economy opportunities. Through these activities, the project will spark awareness and exploration of the circular economy, address skill gaps, support training and help realise opportunities in underserved communities to tackle climate change.

Overall the project will involve working with over 40 participants or community groups in two groups across four locations in Ireland, supporting them to start action projects in the area of reuse and repair.

Background:

The Government recognises the vital role of citizens and communities in addressing climate change. However communities do not always have the support, capacity or know-how to develop low carbon communities and take climate action. The CCAP programme enables organisations and their partners to collaboratively develop supports, tools, know-how and approaches to help communities to take meaningful action on climate change. Specifically in the Rediscovery Centre’s project, these actions will cover Food & Waste, Shopping & Recycling including, for example, repair and upcycling training or workshops or swap shops.

Objectives of Project:

This project will involve co-creating and delivering support to empower communities, including communities at disadvantage, to develop new reuse or repair projects based on their needs. The project aims to move beyond simply ‘raising awareness’ to inspiring action projects, while also delivering direct social impact such as building skills and knowledge in communities and generating training and job opportunities and career pathways.

This model builds on the Rediscovery Centre’s successful Circular Economy Academy, and involves providing group training and one to one support to community participants free of charge, focused on a learning-by-doing approach.