Sustainable Enniscorthy is a voluntary group of local people with a vision to work together with all stakeholders and communities in Enniscorthy to create a thriving sustainable town.  We see our role in 2 ways.  Firstly to raise awareness of sustainability by facilitating, advocating, helping make connections, delivering small projects and supporting the work of others.  Our second role is to be a driver of actions to support sustainability and health and wellbeing in Enniscorthy.  The 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) are a blueprint for our vision.

Sustainability covers lots of things.  Rather than get overwhelmed with everything we could be doing, or not doing, we’d like to highlight the small things that each of us can do, every day, that help towards being a more sustainable town.  Of course there are big things, like retrofitting our homes, switching to electric cars, public transport or cycling, eliminating plastic waste and not using coal burning open fires.  These are worthy aspirations, but the reality is most of us don’t have the money or opportunity or the means to do all of these things.  We’d like to find ways where we can still do things that help make our town more sustainable, whether that’s buying vegetables that don’t have plastic packaging, reducing food waste, using a refillable water bottle, getting things repaired, getting a bus or walking when we can rather than using a car. 

The bigger things can be achieved too, if they’re affordable.  There are grants available from the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI), and that is one of the things that Sustainable Enniscorthy would like to do. We hope to help people understand what steps they can take to improve the energy efficiency of their homes, like extra insulation, heating controls etc as well as helping them to access information on the various grants that are available. This will help us all make more informed decisions about the best options to fit each household's needs, while staying within our own budget.

We are a small group but we can achieve great things by working with other voluntary and community groups.  We’d like our town to lead the way on sustainability, and be an example of how a community can come together to make a real difference.  In order to make that happen, we need to all work together to make changes in our behaviour, big and small, for the benefit of our beautiful Enniscorthy.
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If you would like to get involved in Sustainable Enniscorthy – to be kept informed of our initiatives, please follow us on Facebook or email [email protected].  Our full list of planned and potential future activities/projects is in our Strategy document on our website at www.myenniscorthytown.com . We will have a monthly column here, so we’ll keep you informed of any upcoming events that you might like to be involved in.  Future articles will give more detailed information on the circular economy and how we can achieve it in Enniscorthy, air quality issues and ways to improve it, an energy masterplan for the town, active travel and what we can do to promote it and SEAI grants available among other things.