Raise your hand if you want to read an interesting article! The Ontario Trillium Foundation has published a profile of our Porchlight campaign that highlights their funding support for the recent Ontario-wide campaign.

Have a read below or follow the link at the bottom to visit the OTF website and read the article there.

Turn On Your Porchlight

When Stuart Hickox, executive director of Project Porchlight, speaks to community volunteer groups about energy conservation and global warming, he begins the same way every time.

“Raise your hand if you want to do something about climate change,” he says. Around the rooms, across the gymnasium floors and on the pavement in the parking lots, all the hands go up.

“Keep them up,” he says, waving his own in the air when a few start to drop back down. “Now do this,” he continues. While they watch, he begins to twist his wrist, mimicking the motion of a light bulb being screwed into a socket.
“See, you can do something about climate change.”

“If we’re going to solve this problem, we’re going to have to engage every single person in the solution,” he tells them. With a groundswell grassroots movement that has caught fire right across Canada, it looks like Hickox and Project Porchlight just might do it. A $150,000 grant over one year from the Ontario Trillium Foundation (OTF) was the push that got it started.

Hickox was surfing the Web, reading up on energy-efficient refrigerators when he came across a statistic that galvanized him: If every household were to replace one old-fashioned incandescent light bulb, just one, with a compact fluorescent (CFL) bulb, that single action would generate $50 in energy savings over five years. There was more. If every household in Canada replaced one bulb with a CFL, the reduction in pollution from power generation would be the equivalent of taking 66,000 cars off the road.

“I just couldn’t get that statistic out of my head,” he says. “I was aware of and anxious about global warming and climate change, but I felt that my individual actions didn’t really matter much. Then I realized that changing one bulb is just the start, the catalyst. It’s the universal first action that everyone should take to get involved. If we could get people to take that first step, more changes would follow.”

Hickox, his wife and two friends convinced the hardware store in small-town Kinmount, Ontario, to donate funds to buy 50 CFL bulbs. They knocked on doors in the community and offered free light bulbs, telling people how they could save energy, save money and save the planet. All they were asking them to do was replace just one regular light bulb in their homes with the new one. For free.
“By the time we got back to the store, four people had already come in, wanting to buy more CFL bulbs. We knew we were on to something.”

Back home in Ottawa, people there began to see the light – or more accurately, the light bulbs – too. Hickox and his group got 200 volunteers to hand out light bulbs in their neighbourhoods. By the end of 2006, Hydro Ottawa, the TD bank, the City of Ottawa and a local member of Parliament had become involved. Kinmount’s 50 bulbs were now 225,000.

“It was during the City of Ottawa campaign that we applied to OTF for funding,” Hickox explains. “We didn’t know if our community-based approach would work in places where we didn’t live, and we needed funds to test our methods in other cities.”

They got more than just money. “OTF funds were a seal of approval for us,” says Hickox. “The Foundation’s application process forced us to create a work plan and define measurable indicators. The funds gave us breathing room. We were able to develop our capacity as an organization, figure out how to do things and plan systems that would engage Ontarians to take action to protect the environment.”

The flowering trillium logo on Project Porchlight’s website, on the Porchlight bulb box and in their presentations was a door-opener, he says. Other funders knew of OTF’s reputation for funding thorough and scrupulous project proposals, for backing new and innovative ideas, and for maintaining the highest standards of accountability and transparency. “OTF was not the largest grant,” he says, “but it was the most important source of funding for us.”

“Project Porchlight is more than a stellar example of community activism,” says Kevin Humphrey, program manager for Province-Wide grants with OTF. “It’s a feel-good granting story with the very best of what OTF looks to support in projects: ground-breaking ideas, environmental stewardship and volunteers who believe in their ability to promote positive change in the places they live.”
“Be a light in your community,” Hickox tells those who come out to gatherings, meetings and rallies to help distribute light bulbs. Three years, hundreds of communities and over a million CFL bulbs later country-wide, Project Porchlight and its thousands of volunteers are showing us all how to shine.

GRANT SUMMARY
In 2006, OTF awarded Project Porchlight $150,000 over one year to build on the success of the Ottawa pilot project and facilitate its growth into three communities, resulting in 260,000 compact fluorescent light bulbs being used, which will result in $13-million in energy savings.

Read the article at the OTF website: http://www.trilliumfoundation.org/cms/en/project_porchlight.aspx