Tentou

TENTOU

CATEGORY: THE PLANET

Purpose and description:

Ladybugs are found everywhere on the globe. It is a small insect with many symbolic meanings: when everyone was gathered in Japan and a ladybug crawled up, one of the project partners took it on his finger and went out of the room and said “Marie Marie Marolle, fly up and ask for good weather.”

In Denmark we do exactly the same and since the project partner was Japanese, the project was called Tentou which in Japanese means ladybug.

With the support of the KR Foundation, Samsø Energy Academy in October 2016 assembled in the Tentou partnership with like-minded from Japan, Australia, Maine and Hawaii in the United States with the aim of showing the international dimension of community power.

The Tentou Partnership wants to inspire communities around the globe who share the same principles to make a difference and formulate a new narrative for a required global paradigm shift that can tackle climate change.

Samsø Energy Academy believes that the global climate challenge is best handled locally through the use of democratic principles such as citizen participation and shared ownership. By recognizing global challenges, communities can thus think and act locally and at the same time work on sustainable energy conversion.

Such a solution has been tested with great success on Samsø over the last 20 years. It has helped create a more sustainable economy and a brand of great international value which today makes the island a global frontrunner.

Using ambitious public events and international tours and workshops, Tentou shares information, exchanges experiences and offers capacity building in the strengthening and creation of new, local community power hubs.

Such hubs should encourage stakeholders, citizens, businesses, public institutions, energy companies and schools to collaborate and become the driving forces in a community-based development of sustainable energy.

Finally, the Tentou vision is becoming widespread and copied to communities all over the world and creates so much influence that community power will be tomorrow’s driving force in the global energy conversion

The UN Sustainable Development Goals:  

Revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development

Target 17.16:
Enhance the global partnership for sustainable development, complemented by multi-stakeholder partnerships that mobilize and share knowledge, expertise, technology and financial resources, to support the achievement of the sustainable development goals in all countries, in particular developing countries.

Partners:
Institute for Sustainable Energy Policies, Japan: ISEP is a NGO working with Japanese divestment in centralized nuclear and fossil-fuel energy infrastructure towards a distributed renewable energy.

Island Institute, Rockport, Maine, USA: The Island Institute promotes an integrated community-input approach to sustainable development. 

Embark Australia, Victoria, Australia: Embark Australia is the leading national community energy organization that designs and implement a variety of community renewable energy projects.
Sust ‘aina ble Molokai, Hawaii, USA: Dedicated to creating a model of sustainability for Hawaii. The organization is working to convert the island’s energy system to a 100% renewable system supported by community-oriented energy development.

Samsø Energy Academy, Denmark: Samsø Energy Academy has a world-wide reputation for being the leading model of sustainable community development.

Success criteria:
Spreading of the Samsø sustainable energy transition model world-wide.
Creation of new and strengthening of existing local community power hubs.
Enhance community leadership to inspire change and design a sustainable future

Duration
2016 – 2017 – 2018

Progress and conclusion:

The project served as a pilot for the wide-spread of the Samsø sustainable community model in more than 100 communities in 5 continents.

It tested the concept of community power hubs as facilitators of the engagement process and demonstrated that community power can be the answer to the need for a change of paradigm. It also confirmed that the more capacity and leadership for change is in place, the greater the impact.

Finally, it sought to deliver state-of -the-art guidance for reinforcing the capacity of community power hubs on the ground and introduced evolutionary leadership as an element that could help deliver change.

Funding:
KR-Foundation

The project’s concept was developed by the Energy Academy as a pilot towards the vision to spread the Samsø model of sustainable energy transition to 100 communities around the world. The idea was submitted to the KR Foundation for funding and it was approved.

Results: The project managed to inspire and build more capacity in the partner organisations on the Samsø sustainable community model, as well as on community leadership and the process of community engagement. As a result, it strengthened the community-centred approach for local sustainable development and change in the areas/hubs it reached out to, with more impact in the areas with more capacity in place. Finally, following up on the longstanding cooperation of Samsø with other European islands and communities around the globe, the project planted seeds for a global network of community power hubs that would facilitate community power become a driving force in the global energy conversion.

Samsø Energy Academy contact and Project Manager:

Ongoing projects:

Finished projects:​

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