Energy and communities
Our work with communities facing isolation and disadvantage takes many forms. But at its heart is the goal to support and empower local people to tackle the energy issues their community faces.
Keeping it local to support grassroots change
Food and fuel poverty, little local employment, rural isolation, and unreliable access to services and transport mean people struggle – and that can lead to further isolation and poor physical and mental health.
We have many years’ experience working to support communities in Wales and England to become sustainable, through holistic, place-based regeneration plans that help them to build on their strengths and culture, creating a lasting, self-sustaining future.
We work with isolated and disadvantaged communities – especially across rural Wales – helping them to understand their existing strengths, identify and prioritise the issues they face, and develop grassroots actions to address them. These approaches embed new skills and experience that begin to address the causes, not just the symptoms, of rural poverty.
A sense of place
Key to our success is the skill of our place coordinators, who are not parachuted in from HQ, but spend years with the communities they support.
They are skilled communicators, building trust on the ground and confidently sharing our experiences with decision-makers to influence national policy.
Our approach is one of ‘co-production’. Rather than suggest changes to a town or area, we work intimately with communities to identify their assets, gaps and opportunities, helping them to transform their ideas into community-led projects.
Where we’re working
Energised Communities is a five-year programme (2024-2029) which is supporting ten communities in Wales and England to develop grass-roots solutions to their energy issues, making them more resilient to climate change and fluctuating energy prices.
Supporting community groups in Powys to realise their vision of community-owned solar PV energy generation.
We are providing guidance to ensure that decision-making is made by the community, and that local generation benefits local people – especially those most at risk of fuel poverty
Stage 1 involves scoping and feasibility studies to determine the most viable schemes.
Five groups will receive support with obtaining relevant permissions, developing governance and financial models with a view to being investment-ready by 2027, in total having potential to generate 2.7mW of energy.
Funded by the Energy Redress Just Transition Fund and supported by Powys County Council.
Windfall (officially called the Mid Wales Community Energy Trust or MWCET) is a not-for-profit company that aims to link income from renewable energy with rural regeneration through sustainable energy projects in the communities of Mid Wales.
The money is offered as grants for energy efficiency and renewable energy projects to communities, householders, farmers, schools and businesses across Mid Wales. The basic income is supplemented through match funding from UK and EU sources to maximise the financial capacity of the scheme.
Severn Wye is managing the grant scheme to distribute funds to local communities.
A track record of success
With some 25 years of working across Wales on a variety of community-based projects, and extending into England during 2024, we have fantastic depth and breadth of experience.
On 1 October 2025 The Hive became an independent charity, continuing to operate out of its previous home in the heart of Llandrindod Wells, hosted by the Town Council.
The hub will continue to be firmly embedded in the local community, providing both a physical home and sense of stability for a range of community projects and facilities, including the baby bank, the uniform exchange and the library of things.
Visit The Hive on Facebook
Our seven-year Rural Futures programme – which completed in June 2024 – supported 14 disadvantaged Welsh communities develop grass-roots actions to address the issues they face.
Our ‘place coordinators’ supported community groups to prioritise the issues they wanted to resolve. They worked with them to identify their existing local assets and develop and deliver projects to address them.
Groups could apply for up to £140,000 from The National Lottery Community Fund and leveraged an additional £1.35 million for capital improvements and other costs – demonstrating the strength of their plans and their newfound skills and confidence to ‘sell’ their projects to other funding bodies.
Find out more about each community and read the Rural Futures impact report.
During the seven-year Create Your Space programme, we worked with six groups in Wales that wanted to make transformational environmental change in their communities.
As each project evolved, we developed a network that helped the groups learn together and share successes and failures. We then provided support as needed on business and financial planning, with a growing emphasis on helping the groups think commercially so their projects will be sustainable beyond the life of the programme.
Funded by
Ynys Môn / the Isle of Anglesey in Wales is a unique location for many reasons; not least in the way its remote rural communities experience life on Wales’ northernmost corner.
Households on the island rely heavily on fossil fuels to stay warm and dry at home, and as with almost all remote and dispersed communities, cars are an essential – not a luxury.
With lower-than-average incomes and higher-than-average carbon emissions across Anglesey households – affordable, sustainable energy is a challenge that faces both residents and the environment.
With funding from local enterprise agency Mentor Môn and our community engagement partners BRO, we worked with two communities on the island to pilot schemes that promote energy efficiency and local renewable energy.
Funded by
Severn Wye was a partner in this ground-breaking project to develop ‘green infrastructure’ and jobs in Gwent over three years. Green infrastructure is the network of natural and semi-natural features, green spaces, rivers and lakes that intersperse and connect our villages, towns and cities. It provides areas for leisure and wildlife that contribute to healthy lifestyles and are crucial for mitigating the impacts of climate change.
The partnership was led by Monmouthshire County Council, working with Blaenau Gwent, Caerphilly, Newport and Torfaen councils as well as Natural Resources Wales, and Forest Research.
Severn Wye mapped and analysed existing green infrastructure, waste streams, and land management needs, to identify opportunities for enriching the local environment.
Benefits for local communities included improved access to green spaces including urban and country parks, along cycleways, public rights of way, and woodlands.
The project was supported by the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development: Europe Investing in Rural Areas and funded by the Welsh Government’s Enabling of Natural Resources and Wellbeing Grant.
14 rural communities across 7 years
Check out our film celebrating the achievements of local people supported by Rural Futures programme in Wales
Funders and partners
Examples of the funders and partners we work with currently, as well as those we have worked with on completed programmes
Find out more
If you would like to find out more about our work with energy and communities, to get involved or ask us about other opportunities, please get in touch.