One Environment Network's Power Down Challenge

The main goal of the One Environment Network is to engage employees in implementing small changes to live more sustainably. The Power Down Challenge is an educational tool intended for use by businesses and corporations to help inspire employees to reduce energy use at work and/or at home.

The project promotes three focus areas where employees can conserve energy: computer conservation, lighting conservation and appliance/electronics conservation.To start, workplaces will introduce the project to employees and promote the date that the project starts, asking employees to register to participate.  Registration is an online survey that will identify what actions employees are currently taking to conserve energy and will serve as the baseline for the project. Once all participants are registered, each focus area will be promoted for two weeks, encouraging employees to take specific actions related to the topic. For each focus area, three steps are completed. First, employees will be educated about energy conservation practices related to the focus area through emails, posters, flyers and word of mouth. EarthShare NC will provide content for emails, pre-designed posters and statistics that representatives can use. Second, employees are encouraged to take simple steps to conserve energy at work and at home. Motivational tools will be provided by EarthShare NC that can be used by workplace representatives to encourage employee participation throughout the two week period. Third, at the completion of the three focus areas, employees will be emailed a link to a follow-up online survey.  This will help measure the extent to which employees adopted the conservation practices after education and will be used to evaluate overall results.

The project will provide workplaces with a way to measure the level of employee participation in energy conservation efforts and the opportunity to be a part of a group of workplaces who are collectively demonstrating their commitment to engaging employees in improving the health of our natural environment. Previous participants who have already completed the challenge include: the City of Raleigh, Family Health International, Inspire Pharmaceuticals, North Carolina Department of State Treasurer, Tecan and VF Corporation. The number of employee participants ranged from 38 to 464 and all workplaces showed improvements in conservation efforts at the conclusion of the project.