Locations and dates of the workshops: May 19th, 21th, 23rd, 25th, 26th, 30th, 31st 2022 (Madrid), end of May – beginning of June in Barcelona.
The participants who are to attend the workshops are: citizens from the Senior Centres of Usera district, Madrid, volunteers, residents in a public housing building in Barcelona.
In May, the summer energy culture workshops began. In Madrid, these were held in the senior citizens’ centres of the Usera district coordinated by the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and ABD Madrid. SEPA volunteers participated in the activities by applying the knowledge acquired during the previous trainings. During these workshops, the attendees learned about energy poverty, feminisation of energy poverty, and also learned about the impact of energy poverty on health, thermal well-being, passive strategies to be used at home, types and efficiency of installations, and usage habits.
After the theoretical section, a participatory exercise was carried out in which passive strategies to be applied during the summer were enlisted. These were separated into three different groups: strategies to be eliminated, maintained and incorporated.
The participants commented that some of the strategies shown were already known to them but they did not know what they were called and on the other hand, they learned about new strategies to apply at home.
In Barcelona, the SEPA training continued in collaboration with the local association Eicascantic that promotes volunteering. Overall, 11 SEPA agents have been trained that will be helping socially vulnerable families to cope with summer energy difficulties. Now, the theoretical sessions have finished and the practice is to start soon.
In addition, ABD and Ecoserveis team carried out a session with families from a public housing building in Barcelona. They taught the residents how to read the electricity bills and shared some recommendations to avoid extra charges during the summertime.
