Features

September’s top 10 green crowdfunding projects

Published

11 years ago

September 13, 2013

Blue & Green Tomorrow

Crowdfunding by entrepreneurs and small businesses is becoming an ever-more popular way to secure funds for exciting enterprises and innovations.

Each month we round up our favourite new crowdfunding projects with an emphasis on good causes. Without further ado, this is our list for September.

1. Move Your Money – get ready to fix British banking in 7 days

Readers who have really been paying attention may notice that this is the second time we have featured this campaign in this series. However, with seven-day switching coming into effect next week, we thought this may be a timely reminder. When the service is launched, it is expected that high street banks will spend millions on advertising to attract new customers. Alternative banking campaign group Move Your Money is therefore asking the public to help fund its ‘guerrilla war’ against the big banks’ marketing drive. Launched on BuzzBnk, the crowdfunding campaign will pay for billboards and campaigns dedicated to helping customers get into socially responsible banking.

2. Greentown Labs – a grassroots incubator for clean energy entrepreneurs

Greentown labs in Boston, USA, is one of the largest, fastest-growing, and perhaps only entrepreneur-founded clean energy incubator in the world. It is currently home to nearly 30 early-stage organisations working to solve energy and environmental challenges, employing more than 100 people. Greentown has already raised more that $25 million to build their innovations.

3. The People’s Supermarket

The people’s supermarket is a sustainable store in Oxford “run by local people, for local people.” They are currently seeking funding to expand their product range and repay their loans in order to begin investing their profits in the local community.

4. Urban Harvest

According to Urban Harvest, tonnes of fruit are wasted every year in Birmingham as people don’t have the time or are unable to pick it from their gardens. Even more is wasted on community land. Urban Harvest will pick fruit from people’s gardens and community land, with permission, to be used in places such as food banks and children’s centres.

5. TFI Monday

TFI Monday is an enterprise that aims to help small business owners to help themselves, by providing training and support services to help them grow. TFI Monday hope that this will contribute to ending poverty in their local community in North Wales, providing employment to young people who are either unemployed, or at risk of becoming unemployed.

6. Poverty to Purpose Coffee House

Poverty to Purpose are planning to build a high quality coffee house in Swansea, serving locally sourced food and providing a platform for a uniquely comprehensive NEET apprenticeship scheme and a short-term work placements scheme.

7. No Worries Whale: The Poetic Portal to Conservation

“There is a mammal called the humpback whale, and if you weighed him he’d break your scale.” This charming project hopes to teach children about the importance of protecting the sea through a picture book of conservational poems.

8. Removing Marine Trash from Key Largo Coral Reefs

This project is raising funds for Dive Against Debris Weekend, a 3-day scuba diving event to remove pollution from natural reef sites in the upper Florida Keys.

9. Karachi Energy Conservation Awareness

In response to Pakistan’s energy crisis, the Karachi Energy Conservation Awareness Group aim to teach those who use the most energy, the middle and upper classes, and teach them basic energy conservation.

10. SEED – Classroom for Permaculture Learning Centre

SEED, a 12-year-old charity, are seeking funds to build an “earth sensitive” classroom at the Rocklands Urban Abundance Centre in South Africa, to connect children to the ecosystems that support them.