They found that navigating personal budgets, tracking deadlines, putting trust in tradespeople and learning about different solutions was not clear cut.
So, Ellora created an online platform called Her Own Space to provide women homeowners with knowledge and support for their retrofit projects.
Her Own Space has so far united more than 3,000 women on their renovation journeys.
Ellora felt there was a need for a similar space for both existing and emerging women professionals in the retrofit industry. So she reached out to as many as she could to find out what sort of support was lacking and, earlier this year, Her Retrofit Space was launched.
The membership-based platform includes discussion forums, mentoring, opportunity boards, webinars, a resource library, live demos, in-person events, a professional directory, business support tools and wellbeing advice, in a one-stop shop designed to empower professional women in retrofit.
We met with Ellora to find out all about Her Retrofit Space, the challenges facing women in the sector, and what she hopes the platform will achieve.
Q How did you get into this industry?
My interest in this area actually started as a kid as my father was a builder. He was Austrian and a huge environmentalist. I remember him inventing a wind turbine to try and power houses that he was working on. I grew up with sustainability being key, so when I had the opportunity about 4-5 years ago to delve into retrofit, the doors opened. It was just a passion project at first, in that I was really excited that the technology was starting to exist to do what my father had talked about all his life.
Q How did you get involved in retrofit specifically?
I gradually became invested in women, predominantly homeowners at first, and the struggles they face in undertaking any renovation or retrofit project. I decided during the pandemic that if I was going to work in this sector to support women, it really needed to embrace retrofit and the methods and technology around that.
It wasn’t right to continue down a renovation route without creating more awareness. And so I initially set up Her Own Space, a platform for women homeowners to get support from each other. Then women in the profession started to join, such as retrofit co-ordinators and architects involved in sustainability, who really liked the fact that there was a space aimed at women homeowners. They inherently wanted to support the homeowners without any agenda to sell.
Q How did Her Retrofit Space come about?
As well as a lack of women in the sector in general, there was also a really poor portal of access for women from a career path point of view. I spoke to women from lime plasterers to electricians, who said it’s always been an uphill battle, even when they are interested in this industry.
So at the beginning of this year I really felt passionately that there needed to be a space and a platform to support women, ultimately all with the same goal of driving net zero and really looking at the energy and performance of our homes.
I could see a benefit from women having a space to have those conversations, whether they be personal, or professional, about their careers, and to find access to training. Another obvious opportunity was for women to build their businesses and services around women homeowners.
They really wanted to be part of a professional directory, available for women homeowners to access. So we did a survey. We captured the thoughts and opinions of 92 women working within the professional retrofit industry, either installers, architects, surveyors, or retrofit co-ordinators across all sectors and across all regions. And they really spoke up about the struggles they were having, what they wanted from a platform and how they wanted to access it, what kind of training, what kind of showcasing they needed and what kind of directory they wanted to be part of.
As a result, Her Retrofit Space was born and launched on June 20th.
Q How is it going so far?
We are growing a community of women in this space and empowering women who might run their own businesses. It’s about providing the support they need on marketing better to women homeowners.
It’s being able to collaborate on projects together because we know a lot of retrofit projects require a good team of professionals. We have 15 minute webinars on various topics, a live heat pump demo with Leah Robson and lots of other interesting things coming up.
We’re also planning more in-person events.
Q Why do you feel it’s important to have a dedicated space for women?
There’s a high efficiency of exponential growth that’s known and reported when women collaborate. Setting up my business four years ago, I found tremendous support from a female-only cohort of women who are still my go to today and the support I get from them is both professional and personal.
There’s also the emotional stress of being in an industry that’s trying to make drastic changes quickly. There’s the knowledge sharing and just a different type of conversation. That achieves great strides.
It’s also understanding the pathway for the women homeowners buying into renewables and them having access to empathetic professionals. A sense of empathy, I think, is a key aspect of driving retrofit uptake.
Q How does it support the net zero agenda?
There’s a lot of research to show that women have a huge appetite for sustainable choices.
And the net zero intentions are so important for those professional women in the industry already. Interestingly, the women homeowners have the appetite, but they don’t always know what green looks like or how to achieve it.
So, in our platform are two exceptional women homeowners who undertook retrofit projects themselves and didn’t actually understand what they were doing until the end. The insights of women homeowners who have done that is very informative for professional women, in knowing what the pain points and triggers are.
Q Does Her Retrofit Space have a role to play in furthering the skills agenda?
Absolutely. One of the key aspects is that any partners who sign up to support us are funding not only existing professional women to have a membership, but they also have to fund the equal amount for emerging professional women. So we have got students, trainees and apprentices joining. It’s really important that they have a mentorship scheme.
And other professional women in the group can say whether they are happy to be a mentor as well. We’re exploring colleges and universities we could attend as that might be a really nice way to introduce people in the built environment to retrofit and the green industry pathway.
Retention is also key. One thing that I unfortunately found from the survey was it’s not only a question of attracting women, it’s also retaining women in the industry.
It was clear that some women are becoming very despondent, they can’t access the training they need, or are having to fund it themselves. They were feeling very isolated, or sometimes, even when they are technicians, data scientists or technologists in every way, shape or form, they were being put in the sales or softer skilled jobs.
So women are asking questions about how to navigate those things in our platform and getting the right advice from people who want to see them succeed.
The idea with our funded sponsors is they’re investing in their own staff, providing memberships because they’re focused on those staff members.
A lot of research shows there is safety in talking in an independent space about the challenges they face that they would not normally share in their own business environment.
Q What do you think about the scale and urgency of the retrofit challenge?
Oh it’s like we need to do it yesterday. There’s also a lot of lobbying going on, like the hydrogen lobbying. I’m having homeowners saying, ‘ we might just hang in there for the hydrogen’, and it’s like, this is not even happening on a homeowner scale.
And obviously the narrative is very easy to say ‘don’t do it now, do it on the next round’. Wait for the technology to improve. But the technology has evolved. It’s shifting the mindset with homeowners that the investment is long term enough to do it now rather than wait five or ten years.
I’m really disheartened by how slow things moved in the last 20-30 years. You only have to look at Europe, especially, to see what they have put in place. Obviously green finance is a really big conversation in terms of uptake of technology. I know we have the Boiler Upgrade Scheme, but again people don’t really understand it.
Green mortgages are something that I really think hasn’t been addressed like it has in Europe, so I think policy changes are really needed as well, but until then, I’m going to try and do as much hands-on awareness work as I can.
Q What’s the overall goal?
I’d like to see more women doing more interesting work, more exciting work, collaborating with the right people and making those differences to homeowners that are really needed and for me then, my job is kind of done.
We are on a trajectory to grow many features within the platform and have already started to build an internal resource of projects that the professional members have personally worked on. It provides insight into their approach, materials and both challenges and wins to help others through their learning journey.
Image credit: Ellora Coupe
