Community organisations apply for zero-interest loans to pay for projects such as solar panels, energy efficiency, or purchasing electric vehicles.
We then invite everyone to chip in to raise enough money for the loan. The resultant savings on energy/fuel bills cover the loan repayments into our revolving fund.
We then use more new donations and loan repayments from earlier projects to give a loan to the next project. Once that is paid back, the money is combined again with new donations for another project and so on. A proportion of the loan repayments (up to 20%*) is also used to source new projects and provide technical support.
In this way one donation is used over and over again, multiplying its impact! The proportion of new donations vs repayments used for specific project loans can be seen under each of the projects on the Completed Projects page.
*CORENA recently changed how it allocates its funds to the revolving energy fund. This is to ensure we can source enough projects to keep up with increasing loan repayments and allow us to be self sustaining in to the future. Read about why this decision was made in this great article by our founder, Margaret Hender, in Clean Technica Magazine.
Up until 30/6/22: We allocated 95% of project donations to give interest-free loans to pay for actual project costs, and retain 5% to help CORENA expand our project work. 100% of all project loan repayments go back into our revolving fund to help fund future projects.
From 1/7/22: We reverted to our original policy of allocating 100% of project donations to interest-free loans. To enable sustainable growth of our project work, each year we will allocate a percentage of loan repayments, never more than 20%, towards paying staff to help our volunteers with the growing project management workload.
Impact Calculator
We knew our revolving fund would mean that donated money would be used again and again, but even we were surprised when we analysed what happens in detail.
Go to the Impact Calculator to see how your donation has grown.
