Retrofit Reimagined: Panel with Rebecca Lane, George Simms, Rufus Grantham, Indy Johar + Dan Hill

This panel explores how we might engage and funnel finance to the right places that will make the interventions towards the challenges we're facing actually happen. On this panel we have people from the private and public sectors, as well as those looking systemically at the issues we face.

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Discover more about the panelists:

Becky is a passionate leader in the energy and home retrofit space. She has lead the creation and delivery Net Zero Neighbourhood programme at WMCA and other place-based retrofit schemes in the West Midlands. Moving forward, Becky will be CEO of RETRO, with investment from Nesta, which provides end-to-end retrofit service to help private homeowners start their energy efficiency journey and support them through to delivery. Becky is also a Director at the Sustainable Housing Action Partnership, working with retrofit practitioners across the supply chain and different housing tenures to share best practice. Previously, she has also been technical lead on numerous energy innovation projects as a Consultant at Energy Systems Catapult, covering topics including home energy services and smart local energy systems.

Connect with Becky

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George Simms leads WMCA’s SMART Hub (Sustainable Market for Affordable Retrofit Technologies), which aims to build capacity within the WMCA and partner organisations to deliver the 294,000 retrofits in the region targeted by 2026 and the subsequent transition of the housing stock to net zero by 2041. He has a background in retrofit and has worked in this field in local government and consultancy, most recently at the Energy Systems Catapult.

Connect with George:

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Rufus Grantham is Head of Urban Transition Finance and Head of UK/Ireland at not-for-profit sustainable finance advisory firm BwB, where he advises foundations, corporates, NGOs & Local and National government bodies on how to fund net-zero carbon strategies as well as deliver improved social outcomes. The core of this work has been on developing an innovative place-based funding and implementation approach to decarbonising the built environment at neighbourhood, and ultimately national, scale.

Connect with Rufus:

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Indy Johar is a founding Director of 00 and Dark Matter Labs. An architect by training, Indy is a Senior Innovation Associate with the Young Foundation and a visiting Professor at the University of Sheffield. He co-founded Impact Hub Birmingham and Open Systems Lab, was a member of the RSA’s Inclusive Growth Commission. He is a thought leader in system change, the future of urban infrastructure finance, outcome-based investment, and the future of governance.

Connect with Indy:

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This talk took place at Selwyn Road Playing Fields (Birmingham Settlement) in Ladywood on Thursday 13th July 2022 as part of Retrofit Reimagined Day 2: Systemic Challenges & Opportunities Surrounding Retrofit. Retrofit Reimagined was a four day neighbourhood festival that ran 13th — 16th July 2022 in Birmingham, UK that sought to bring together neighbours, practitioners, and organisers from across the country who are focused on retrofit, its role in the future of decarbonising our built environment and a just transition.

Hosted in partnership with Dark Matter Labs, ACAN and zero carbon house, within a wider 3 week festival from CIVIC SQUARE that explored regenerative neighbourhoods together with many people and partners, as a collective we aimed to converge some of the most inspiring and impactful work on retrofit, with many different sectors, practices and ideas coming together to form new combinations.

Our hope is to establish solidarity, share knowledge and resources, and galvanise collective momentum around more equitable, creative, collective approaches to decarbonising the built environment, reimagining retrofit from being one of our biggest challenges to one of our greatest opportunities to transition equitably together.