At the heart of what we do is community benefit. The Green Finance Community Hub was set up in May 2022 as a Community Interest Company (CIC), to further develop Cumbria’s Green Investment Plan with the aim to –
- Support local projects to become more investable so as to speed up the flow of green finance locally.
- Amplify local green finance opportunities in decarbonisation and nature-based solutions.
- Convene community and investor participation so local needs are understood and the community benefit enhanced.
Projects will be diverse in terms of size and diverse in the type of financing required from institutional investors, banks, public finance institutions, and community finance institutions. We will focus on stakeholder engagement, research, feasibility studies, and pilots.
Some Projects We’ve Been Working On
In our Green Investment Plan Cumbria report, we suggested ‘Project Collette‘ (as in collective) that aims to be England’s first community-owned offshore wind farm off the coast of West Cumbria/Cumberland that would use its abundance of offshore wind to produce green hydrogen and green steel and create new supply chain and infrastructure opportunities.
We are developing Project Collette in partnership with Arup and Energy 4 All – with the early support of Cumbria Local Enterprise Partnership (CLEP), the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment (LSE) and others.
We’ve also been working, funding permitted, on various other projects including a pioneering community-focused ‘Ecosystem Warehousing’ financing mechanism that our Hub has created. We will work on this with local, regional and national nature groups. We also have started developing an innovative community-focused financing scheme for EV charge points in rural areas.
As of May 2024 and for the foreseeable future, we will focus on incubating Project Collette and we are currently waiting on funding news for this project.
Directors of the Hub
Ciara Shannon is the co-founder and director of the Hub and she currently lives in Cumbria. Her interest in sustainability began when she advised a family office in Hong Kong. During her time there, she worked closely with an Asian Sustainable and Responsible Investment Forum and she shared these insights as a lecturer on corporate sustainability and climate change at various universities. Later, Ciara was awarded for her climate work with the business sector, and since then, she’s collaborated with many other sectors and stakeholders on complex systemic climate issues and projects. She’s about to start working as the Green Finance Lead for the North West Net Zero Hub.
Peter Head CBE FREng FRSA is a director of the Hub. He is a champion of sustainable development. He advocates that changing the way we invest public and private money in the built environment could be made very much more effective if the public and private sectors adopt sustainable development principles. Peter is a civil and structural engineer and for his work on the Dongtan Eco-city planning project, it was voted by Chinese developers in 2005 as the most influential development project in China. Peter has been the recipient of many awards including the Award of Merit of IABSE, the Royal Academy of Engineering’s Silver Medal and the Prince Philip Award for Polymers in the Service of Mankind.
Ian Callaghan – is a director of the Hub. He is an investment banker by background, has been involved in investing for social and environmental impact for more than 15 years and has specialised in climate finance since 2015. He is the originator of the Climate Finance Accelerator (CFA), a multi-million-pound capacity building programme funded by the UK government, and acts as adviser to the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) on the operation of the programme in 9 larger emerging markets. He also remains active as an adviser and consultant in sustainable finance in various roles.
Associates 
Ian Dickie – director of economics for the environment consultancy (eftec) and also a member of the advisory panel for the Capitals Coalition, and a board member of the Aldersgate Group. At eftec, he has managed over £2.5 million worth of research for the Defra family in the UK, including natural capital investment cases in England for the 1st UK Natural Capital Committee. He was an author of the Natural Capital Protocol, and a technical author of the UNDP’s Biodiversity Finance Guide (BIOFIN) and has directed natural capital accounts for over 30 private land-managing organisations, including in the Transport, Forestry and Agriculture sectors.
Matt Bleasdale – Offshore wind consultant. Matt studied aeronautical engineering and started his offshore career in subsea engineering. For the last sixteen years, he has worked in the offshore wind industry across all stages of project development from identification to finance and construction, for developers, suppliers, and certification agencies, to non-governmental bodies such as The Crown Estate. In 2014, he set up OWLC to reduce the cost, impact, and risk of offshore wind while accelerating the deployment of it and he has a detailed commercial and technical understanding from origination to decommissioning. He is now working as an independent consultant.
History – The Green Investment Plan Report – 2021-2022
In 2021, Ciara Shannon and Prof Nick Robins (Grantham Research Institute, LSE), co-founded the Green Investment Plan Project for Cumbria and this project simply would not have been possible without the collaborative spirit of all the local and national organisations we worked with. To name a few – special thanks go to Cumbria Action for Sustainability (CAfS) for their fantastic help, LSE and Arup for partnering with us and the Cumbria Local Enterprise Partnership (CLEP) and the Green Finance Institute (GFI) for their early encouragement.
Together, we created the Green Investment Plan Cumbria to show how Cumbria could become the first climate positive county through a credible financing strategy and we outlined some transformative net zero projects that would respond to the needs and priorities of the local community.
This report has since been downloaded thousands of times across the UK and globally from Finland, Canada, Ukraine, Netherlands, India, China and the USA (to name some countries). It is encouraging that our research is serving as a wider public good and is a useful resource for placed-based green financing.
TEAM: Prof Nick Robins, Grantham Research Institute, LSE (Chair). Ciara Shannon, EdenWorks Green (Project Leader). Michael Osborne, Arup, Adrian Anderson, Arup. Anne Chapman, independent consultant. Ian Callaghan, Ian Callaghan and Associates. Ian Dickie, economics for the environment consultancy (eftec). Alistair Kirkbride, Gridsquare, independent consultant. Peter Head, Resilience Brokers. Charlotte Eddington, Abundance Investments. Phil Davies, CAfS. Charles Callaghan and Rhiannon Thorpe.
PARTNERS: EdenWorks Green, Grantham Research Institute (LSE), Cumbria Action for Sustainability (CAfs) and Arup.
ADVISORY PANEL: Rob Allison (Lake District National Park), Adam Briggs (NFU), Simon Crichton (Triodos), Tim Gale (Zero Cumbria Carbon Partnership), Andy Gouldson (Leeds University), Ingrid Holmes (GFI), Jo Lappin (Cumbria LEP), Andy Kerr (Climate-KIC), Karen Mitchell (CAfS), Steve Sankson (Nat West), Camilla Toulmin (member of Cumbria Local Nature Partnership and Lancaster University) and Ian Wheeler (Cumbria LEP).
WITH THANKS
In 2024, we are waiting on funding news for Project Collette. We will update here, once we know more.
In 2022/23, we received a small development grant from Friends Provident Foundation to develop some of the ideas within the Green Investment Report.
In 2021, we were funded by the Quadrature Climate Foundation.
Green Finance Community Hub 