Community organisations, Development Trusts and local stakeholders are being invited to Introduction to Community Shared Ownership in South Lanarkshire, a workshop where experts from across the community energy sector will explain how community shared ownership works.

Participants will also learn about the support that is available to local groups and the opportunities emerging from renewable-energy developments across South Lanarkshire.

The workshop will be held at St Bride's Community Centre, Douglas, on Tuesday, 20 October, from 2-5pm. For those unable to attend in person, it will be repeated online on Tuesday, 3 November, from 7-8.45pm.

Both the workshop in Douglas and the online event are free to attend and places can be booked through Eventbrite.

Councillor Robert Brown, Chair of the Community and Enterprises Committee, said: “Community Shared Ownership creates opportunities for long-term income-generation and community wealth-building. This is separate from, and additional to, traditional community-benefit funding and offers future security and sustainability, both of which are vital to local communities but are also becoming increasingly more difficult to achieve.

“We therefore hope that many community representatives take up this opportunity to start exploring how they can become financial partners in renewable energy projects, and to discover the support, financing options and potential renewable-energy opportunities that are available to them.”

The workshops will be hosted by South Lanarkshire Council and Voluntary Action South Lanarkshire (VASLAN), with input from Community Energy Scotland (CES), Democratic Finance Scotland (DFS), Development Trust Association Scotland (DTAS), Enegy4All, Local Energy Scotland (LES) and renewables developers Nadara and OnPath Energy, and are funded by South Lanarkshire Council.

The workshop comes at a time when both Scottish and UK Governments have stated targets of 2GW and 8GW respectively for Shared Community Ownership and will feature case studies and experience of real-life examples of successful projects from across Scotland, including the nuanced technical and financial arrangements which supported them.