Author: Adam Clare

Minds in Motion

Minds in Motion is an international online community and learning network on sustainable mobility, supported by the Dutch Ministry of Transport and Platform Sustainable Mobility.

Mission
Our mission is to speed up the adoption of sustainable mobility technologies and behaviour across Europe and beyond. We hope to do this by enabling people interested in sustainable mobility to connect to each other, discuss projects, form partnerships, exchange ideas, and generally contribute to the spread of knowledge, experience and best practice in sustainable mobility.

Community
The MindsinMotion.net Community has members from all around Europe and beyond. Currently, our focal countries are Austria, Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. However, we do keep track of the most interesting developments in other countries as well.

Greener Homes for Aussies and Brits

Both the British and Australian governments have announced that they will help home owners green their homes. Australia is offering 2.2 million homes a free insulation upgrade and more financial incentives for solar water heating. In the UK, it was announced that the government will help people with a full ‘eco-makeover’.

More than one in four homes in the UK will be offered a complete eco-makeover under ambitious plans expected to be announced this week to slash fuel bills and cut global warming pollution.

The campaign is thought to involve giving 7m houses and flats a complete refit to improve insulation, and will be compared to the 10-year programme that converted British homes to gas central heating in the 1960s and 1970s. Householders could also be encouraged to install small-scale renewable and low-carbon heating systems such as solar panels and wood-burning boilers.

In total, it is thought the Department of Energy and Climate Change will commit to cutting a third of greenhouse gas emissions from households by 2020.

IssueLab Researches Some Good

The folks over at IssueLab have sent me some neat stuff that they and their research contributers are up to. One of their research contributers has done some research into who’s Lobbying for Good and they’ve done an introspective CloseUp for last year.

“Lobbying for Good” explores how nonprofits are increasingly working with
their corporate partners to leverage companies’ political clout and
governmental affairs departments in support of cause related lobbying
efforts. (For instance, companies like Mary Kay and Royal Dutch Shell are
using their governmental affairs clout to lobby for the nonprofits and
causes they support.)

Given the fact that we have a new administration entering office next week I
think this report could also spark some interesting discussion on the blog
re: strategies for creating positive change over the next 4+ years.

Authored by FSG Social Impact Advisors, the report is a quick read and
offers some interesting case studies that serve as examples of, well
frankly, things that are good!

Readers can download and review “Lobbying for Good” at
http://www.issuelab.org/research/lobbying_for_good

In December they released a roundup of the most popular research documents:

IssueLab’s End of the Year Lists, including the most popular research titles on IssueLab, are based on more than 96,000 downloads in just the past 11 months. Check it out at www.issuelab.org/closeup