The purpose of Empower Community is to accelerate the transition to a low carbon economy by providing access to much-needed capital for community renewable energy and energy efficiency projects.
It is designed to create a virtuous cycle of resource allocation for social and environmental benefit that encourages large-scale community participation, ownership and responsibility.
Empower Community is a social enterprise that balances the interests of all stakeholders by providing a high quality investment opportunity with attractive returns, reinvesting profits in further community projects and facilitating a community share in revenues and ultimate community ownership of assets. While grass-roots, action-oriented responses to climate change continue to grow exponentially, the current limited access to finance is hampering the wholesale development and implementation of distributed energy solutions at anything like the scale or speed required.
From left to right, standing: Leapfrog Finance (Richard O’Rourke, Matthew Andrews), Empower Community (Bob Knowles, Paul Yiannouzis). Seated: Alex Grayson, Empower Community