Collaboration is key for effective, ethical retrofit finance: How we worked with credit unions

The ‘A Credit Union One-Stop Shop for Retrofit and Finance’ project was part of the Green Home Finance Accelerator (GHFA) Pilot Phase programme. The project brought together a diverse group of partners from the worlds of mutual finance and retrofit.

The project partners were:

• People Powered Retrofit: A retrofit one-stop shop based in Manchester and serving the North West of England.

• Metro Moneywise Credit Union: A payroll credit union based in Rochdale.

• Carbon Co-op: A community energy co-operative based in Manchester.

• The Association for British Credit Unions (ABCUL): The main trade association for credit unions in Britain.

• Manchester Care and Repair: A home improvement agency and retrofit supply chain intermediary.

• Julie Godefroy Associates: An expert sustainability consultant.

• Loco Home Retrofit: A community retrofit one-stop shop based in Glasgow.

Partners also worked closely with South Manchester Credit Union and the SoundPound Group, who are a consortium of credit unions from across Greater Manchester.

This blog post will explore how the partnership worked together and collaborated effectively to develop new loan products for retrofit. For more information about what happened on the project and the partners’ key learnings, see more here.

At the core of the partnership was a set of common goals and values. Credit unions are not-for-profit financial co-operatives. They are owned and controlled by their members. While credit unions come in a huge range of shapes and sizes, they all offer responsible lending, financial education, and ethical saving. Credit unions aim to empower their members and support their communities.

The retrofit experts on this project are also member-owned co-operatives, focusing on community- and person-centred approaches to retrofit and energy.

Shared values and a common ethos helped to establish trust between members of the partnership. Trust, in turn, led to partners being honest with one another and better able to tackle challenging moments.

Clear communication and effective coordination were also factors in the success of the partnership. With seven partners, as well as five members of the SoundPound group, the partnership was quite large and could have been cumbersome!

In the project evaluation, partners said that they were able to collaborate effectively due to good project management, explicit tasks and responsibilities, well-facilitated and regular partnership meetings, and effective and focused workshops.

The partnership produced a lot of high-quality, innovative research, development and planning during the project, but were not able to get loans out to members. Factors that impacted this included the ambitious scope and short timeframe of the project. Timelines were not only short, but also sometimes misaligned with partners’ other priorities. For example, the first pilot of the Better Home Loan was scheduled for October-November. Credit unions shared that this period was extremely busy for them, as the run-up to Christmas is a peak for lending.

The misaligned timelines also point to a challenge when attempting to implement ‘innovation’ projects within a service delivery context. The GHFA Pilot programme required the project to be set up for rapid innovation. Credit unions are, at their core, service delivery organisations; it was challenging to implement the innovation work whilst still ensuring effective service delivery to their members.

While the partners worked well together, the project suffered from a lack of contact with other GHFA projects. Partners have benefited greatly from learning from other projects. Shared challenges could have been tackled together, and shared solutions could have helped the partnership to move forward more effectively.

The strengthening of relationships between project partners, collaborators and new contacts was a hugely positive outcome produced by the project.

During the project evaluation, all partners shared how much they enjoyed working with one another! Partners talked about how they enjoyed getting to know each other better, learning from one another, making new connections, and finding new opportunities for collaboration.

These relationships put the partnership in a strong position to carry on with the work that was started on this project, ensuring that the future of credit union lending for retrofit is bright!