Communities Fund has provided £1,115 of match funding
From One Street To Fifty
London, Greater London, United Kingdom
Your donation unlocks match funding
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Your donation unlocks match funding
Aim
We turned one street solar-powered. This winter we're doing 50 homes across Waltham Forest.
Two years ago, we turned our street in Walthamstow into a solar-powered, POWER STATION.
Initially it was 16 houses - now there's been another wave and there's 25 Power Stations on the street.
And our movie Power Station, has now had over 400 screenings and reached tens of thousands of people who wanted to know how to do the same thing on their own street. Just this week 800 new people have registered to watch the film in an online screening.
Earlier this year, we had then Energy Secretary Ed Miliband visit us in Walthamstow and our local MP threw herself behind the project causing a wave of excitement that resulted in another 130 streets in Waltham Forest wanting to turn themselves into Power Stations.
Our small project on one street has become the seed of something much bigger.
We've set up The Powerful CBS as a properly registered community energy society, and we've secured £750,000 to build it into a genuinely replicable model.
£250,000 of that is a grant over 2 years to set up as an ethical, local lending machine, a structure that's designed to be built right across the UK, not just here in Waltham Forest.
The other £500,000 is a loan facility that lets us get 50 houses solar'd and batteried up this winter, ahead of a share offer that will eventually let local people / or people right the way across the UK invest directly in their own street's energy.
This winter, we're scaling our project from one street to 50 homes across Waltham Forest, and proving out the financial model that makes the whole thing repeatable elsewhere.
Every experiment needs proof it worked, and proof is what spreads it further.
The £50,000 we're raising here funds us doing what we do best: filming and arting it as it happens, the same way we filmed and arted the first street, and turning it into a free how-to guide showing the financial model itself, the CBS structure, the lending facility, the share offer, in enough detail that other towns can actually build it too.
This isn't another feature film, but the practical playbook for the bit that's hardest to copy: the money.
Documenting this process isn't neutral record-keeping, it's how change actually happens. Filming our own street didn't just describe community energy, it put it in front of the Energy Secretary, into Parliament, and in front of the incoming council leadership now negotiating a borough-wide programme with us.
That's what documenting this rollout does again, at fifty homes, for every community watching, not just our own.
It helps communities prevent further emissions by giving other streets a proven, replicable template for switching to community-owned solar, removing the guesswork that currently stops most streets from starting.
It helps communities prepare for the impacts of a changing climate and volatile energy markets by transferring the cooperative financing and organising model itself, not just the technology, so other groups can build genuine energy resilience and shared ownership rather than relying on external providers.
And it helps communities adapt by turning three years of trial and error, planning permission, FCA compliance, financing structures and resident organising into a free, practical guide, lowering the barrier for any UK community wanting to replicate this without the years we spent learning it ourselves.
This isn't a resource dropped into a void. We already have the audience for it: around 500 people register every week to watch Power Station, and we've run a free monthly Street by Street helpline call for over a year, open to everyone, paying member or not. This guide slots straight into a community that's already asking these questions.
The £750k we've raised is earmarked for the lending structure and the installs. By the terms of that funding, none of it can pay for documenting how we built it, and that's exactly the gap most funders won't fill.
That's what your donation goes toward.
Fifty homes, one winter, and a financial model built to spread far beyond our own borough. This is where poetry meets entrepreneurship, and our project can actually have the mass impact we always hoped it would.
Budget breakdown: What your £50,000 funds
This covers 4.2 months of dedicated work to film, document and share this winter's rollout:
- Team & production costs: £10,700/month × 4.2 months = £45,200 (the small core team dedicated to filming, coordinating and delivering the winter rollout, alongside studio space, accountancy and freelance editing that turns raw footage into the finished series)
- New camera and lens: £4,800 (one-off), a Sony FX3 and lens, replacing kit reaching the end of its working life, owned outright by Optimistic Foundation CIC
Funding method
Keep what you raise – this project will receive all pledges made by 31st October 2026 at 10:31am