Welcome to our second newsletter! In this issue we report from the first sessions of our Academy for Energy Citizenship leadership and from exciting events that ENCLUDE has participated.

Enjoy the read!

The ENCLUDE Academy for Energy Citizen Leadership is an online program for leadership development and civic engagement for decarbonization. Participants will hone their individual leadership and collective organization skills and connect to one another and to energy experts. The program aims to help people that are interested in making a change in their own communities to reduce carbon emissions. The Academy will offer:

• Opportunities for practical learning

• A meeting place for collaboration

• Support for bottom-up actions for inclusive decarbonization

Find more about the Academy in the video below:

The ENCLUDE Academy's opening session took place on 29th of September 2022. What is an energy citizen? What is your relationship to energy and how does it impact your communities now and into the future? These are just a few questions that we want to explore through our Academy for Energy Citizen Leadership along with our participants. We tried to get to know each other as people by listening to one another and building a common understanding of each other’s motivations. Now we had already completed successfully 4 sessions and we keep going. These sessions will continue until the end of April 2023, so stay tuned to be updated.

Here are how our participants said hello in 13 different languages. A truly multi-cultural Academy!

“What is your level of expertise/knowledge about the energy?” The participants used their hands to show your answer (low: bottom of screen; high: top of the screen).

What comes to mind when you hear the words "energy citizenship"? We provided our participants with a series of pictures that each person can choose from that they can take to represent how they react to the term "energy citizenship".

Who is an energy citizen and what is the decarbonization potential of energy citizenship. This was a driving question in the 2nd General Assembly of the ENCLUDE project, that was completed successfully on 22-23 September at Delft University of Technology! Our partners’ warm and positive spirit allowed us to make progress in defining and operationalizing energy citizenship as well planning our upcoming results. We finally had the chance to discuss how the work of separate partners relate to each other. We highlighted the main results of the case studies analysis so far and how they can be integrated into our modelling activities. We also focused on next steps regarding the ENCLUDE Academy and the Interactive Policy Platform. We have a common purpose of supporting inclusiveness into the process of change and transformation in society at a turning point in our energy.

ENCLUDE's coordinator BinBin Pearce presented the project at the EU-SPRI 2022 conference on 2 June 2022. ENCLUDE was presented under the track "Role of science in policy: new requirements and new challenges". More information about the conference can be found here.

ENCLUDE participated in the Summer School "Citizen Energy Movement in the Balkans", organized by the EUCENA project, in Thessaloniki, Greece on the 28th-30th of June 2022. The citizen energy movement is evolving all over Europe, dictating the need for citizens and local communities to access clean and affordable energy and to contribute actively to the transition to a just, democratic and inclusive energy system across Europe. Find more here.

Our partners Christina Hoicka, and Vanja Djinlev attended and presented ENCLUDE at the "Energy Research and Social Science" conference, in Manchester, UK. The International Conference on Energy Research and Social Science is considered the premier global forum for exploring the nexus of energy and society. The conference highlighted and explored the grand societal challenges arising at the interface of global energy transformations on the one hand, and ongoing climate mitigation and adaptation efforts on the other. Find more here.

A podcast episode just came out where our partner BinBin Pearce was interviewed with Margot Vingerhoedt, member of the Ecopower energy cooperative answering the question in which way we can make a change happen together creating simultaneously a culture of energy citizenship. BinBin Pearce has been looking into the sociological aspect of collaboration using inputs from environmental science. Margot Vingerhoedt spends her everyday job life persuading people to join the renewable energy cooperative and contribute to the energy transition. This episode was produced with support from SCCALE 20-30-50. It was a transdisciplinary approach to the topic! Find more here.

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