Lighting the way

Janette and Henry: Janette Linschoten and Henry Smith, two of the drivers of the Titahi Bay Lions Club Lightbulb ChallengeToday the Be The Change team visited Janette Linschoten and Henry Smith from the Titahi Bay Lions Club – a small but very active community group about 20km north of Wellington.

The Titahi Bay Lions Club came to our attention during our pre-tour research, when we heard about the Titahi Bay Lightbulb Challenge. The group visited every house and replaced 7,000 of Titahi Bay’s old incandescent light bulbs with new energy efficient compact fluorescent light bulbs, all over the course of six weekends!

Other community groups, from school groups to sports teams, came forward to volunteer to install the bulbs. The bulbs were sold to households for $2 each, and the installation team received 50 cents per bulb, so the project was a fundraiser too.

What a great idea!

Their motivation for the challenge was ‘doing something for the community’, and by exchanging their light bulbs they’ve helped the community to reduce their carbon footprint 558 tonnes, reduced 8000 megawatts from their energy bills, raised money for the light bulb installing groups, and it bought the community closer together too.

As far as we’ve heard, they’re the first and only community group to take on such a big light bulb exchanging project and they’re happy for others to follow their pilot project and give it a go. If you know of another group who’ve run a similar project then let us know via the ‘stories’ section of this website.

They only had about nine active members at the time, and Janette (the Project Manager) was coordinating the well known Porirua Saturday markets and being a full time Mum too, but by reaching into their community they found plenty of others to join in. This project really goes to show just how much a small but inspired group of people can achieve.

Check out their website at http://www.titahibaylions.org/