Manchester Care and Repair (MC&R) is a charity that helps older, disabled and vulnerable people to stay safe, warm and independent in their own homes for as long as possible. We help people maintain their homes, maximise their income and access the support they need.
The Carbon Literacy training was eye-opening… It connected global climate issues with our everyday decisions.
We began our Carbon Literacy journey in 2023 when the Chief Executive and Sustainability Officer became carbon literate. At that time, we had been exploring what climate change meant for us as an organisation through the staff ‘Green Team’ and reducing our emissions in areas such as office energy use waste and air pollution. At the strategic level, we were talking about domestic retrofit. We knew MC&R’s expertise in working with elderly and vulnerable homeowners would be useful in supporting the Greater Manchester Retrofit Plan. But staff needed the chance to come together for a longer time and discuss things in depth. The organisation needed to be on the same page. We saw Carbon Literacy training as a way to bring people together in one room, join the dots between bits of work going on across the charity, and learn about retrofit in the context of MC&R’s charitable purposes and wider climate issues. There wasn’t a Carbon Literacy course for our sector, so we commissioned our Sustainability Officer to write ‘Carbon Literacy for Home Improvement Agencies’.
Climate mitigation and adaptation turn out to be key for our charitable purpose.
We held the training in our own office beginning on 14th August 2024, in small groups made up of staff and directors across the organisation as well as one of our trustees. We chose to do each course in a single day so learners could step away from their work and focus on the learning. A highlight was having real frank discussions about our responsibilities and opportunities as a charity. IT was important to link the impacts of climate change to MC&R’s organisational aims: we exist to support elderly people and prevent health problems, so extreme weather such as flooding, damp and heatwaves is really relevant to our work. Next, we needed to convert those conversations into meaningful pledges and written evidence forms. The pledges were the most challenging part. No one comes up with a strong action plan right away, but it helped to start by generating ideas and then build them up gradually, improving them in groups and pairs as well as individually. When learners had trouble thinking of pledges, we’d come back to the carbon footprints we had looked at earlier in the day – to see where the opportunities were. We found it helped to break the form into parts to integrate it more organically into the day’s programme.
It really takes away your selfishness, doesn’t it?
One of the best outcomes from the training is a shared set of references for what needs changing in our sector and why we, MC&R, are getting involved with it. For example, our work has always been about health and cost of living: retrofit is an extension of our repair services, improving energy resilience is an extension of our work on fuel poverty. If we saw our remit as ‘only’ repairing homes and helping people to save money we’d be missing the chance to improve the home for its owner in other ways – including reduced energy bills and better thermal comfort. Carbon Literacy has brought other priorities more into focus: such as improving heatwave responses in our region. This was already a strategic goal individual staff members knew about: but now everyone knows how the changing climate will affect our beneficiaries, and it feels relevant to our day-to-day interactions. Climate mitigation and adaptation turn out to be relevant to our charitable purposes. Some staff used their action pledges to iron out operational difficulties, such as reducing the distance our home-visiting staff have to drive to do their work.
I’ve since started planning home visits and office travel in smarter, more sustainable ways—reducing unnecessary journeys and cutting down on fuel use.
What’s next for carbon literacy? We’re going to revisit pledges and plans made during the training, as well as reporting certification levels in our environmental report. We plan to offer training to new staff and trustees each year, in line with Carbon Literacy Action Day. We moved out of our leased office in 2025 and are renovating an old community building to be our new office. Carbon Literacy helped give us the language and framework to explore this opportunity collectively; and we intend to use the new building as a base for promoting carbon literacy, energy resilience and retrofit. Last but not least, we want to offer this course to other home improvement agencies across the UK, to work together to improve our response to climate change as a sector.
