After a very long journey, ECOE is near to finalising its plans for its energy advice activities – and we want to tell you about what’s happening at a meeting on Zoom at 7pm on March 20th. We invite members to register for the meeting here.
We’ve shared our plan to transfer our Healthy Homes and Retrofit activities to a charity in this post and at our AGM in 2024. Our intention had been to transfer these activities to the charity then known as the Climate Action Hub Exeter (CAHE), and that they would operate under the name ECOE Advice. We started this process and transferred some funds to CAHE, in order for the energy advice activities to move into a property at 20 Queen Street in September 2024.
However, when working on the final details of the transition, a problem emerged in November 2024 about type of charity that CAHE is. It is a Charitable Incorporated Organisation (CIO), which is too limited in what it can do for ECOE Advice’s purposes. As such ECOE has had to pull out of the arrangement with CAHE. In addition, 20 Queen Street is much smaller than the original property we’d planned to occupy in St Thomas, which makes it more challenging to share space with a climate hub.
Enter SCS
Instead of working with CAHE/Pulse, ECOE has established a new organisation called Sustainable Community Solutions (SCS) Ltd, registering it with Companies House on 7th February 2025. SCS is a charitable company limited by guarantee, a more flexible form of charity.
The company has three directors, Eva Neitzert, Ellie Lister and Duncan Banks. The current plan is that the Chair and Marketing Directors of ECOE, David Bacon and Andy Extance, will also join the CLG as ex-officio directors. Ex-officio means that the posts are a result of and directly tied to David and Andy’s roles, or offices, with ECOE. If David or Andy leave or change their roles with ECOE, the post with SCS will go to whoever replaces them.
Crediting SCS’s bank account will trigger an application to register it with the Charities Commission. We’d like the ECOE Advice activities to transition to the charity simultaneously. As such we must now transfer a substantial sum of money, as well as most of ECOE’s contractors, to SCS.
We would like to offer an opportunity for our members to hear about our plans, and to make comments and ask questions. We hope that you can join us to do this on Zoom at 7pm on March 20th. Please register here to join us.
Frequently asked questions:
Why is this happening?
There are eight reasons, listed in this post.
What is happening with 20 Queen St?
CAHE/Pulse holds a licence to occupy it until March 11. ECOE and SCS are working on getting SCS to sign a lease after that point.
Read more on this here.
