Hello members of the FPRN,

I hope you are all well, I'm certainly enjoying the sunshine, something of a rarity in Sheffield! It's hard to believe that almost a week has passed since we had our first meeting. For those of you that were there - thanks for coming, and those of you that couldn't make it, we look forward to seeing you in future events.

In order to improve our communications as a group we have set up this JISCMail distribution list. It means we can all contact each other, without having to share email addresses and so on. If you register on the site you can also manage your subscription and choose to have digest emails rather than receiving each reply individually to your inbox.

Aimee has already sent round the presentations from last weeks event, but I will look to upload these to this list as well, the web link is www.jiscmail.ac.uk/FPRN.

In the mean time do use this list to talk to each other about fuel poverty/energy efficiency etc. related research, projects and outputs. We'd love to hear your thoughts on what you'd like FPRN to do - a brief summary from last Thursday suggested:

1. Set up a website (that is accessible and functional) with member lists, forum and so on
2. Find some funding to make sure FPRN continues to grow
3. Set the date for the next event (To be held in Salford in Autumn 2016)
4. Find someone to host the 3rd FPRN event (early 2017)

My question to you all is, how do we go beyond being a talking shop? I envisage members coming together for joint grant bids (whether academic, consultancy or other). I'd also like people to try to engage more with their media contacts - start planning now for the autumn. Can you get a debate on local radio, articles in newspapers, write for The Conversation? For the academics out there, it would be awesome to have lots of fuel poverty events as part of the ESRC Festival of the Social Sciences this autumn - there are lots of members of this group from non-academic roles who I'm sure would love to help make these policy relevant, successful events. Let's give our work a bigger profile.

Anyway, that's quite enough rambling. I look forward to hearing your thoughts. If you want to be involved in pushing things forward, get in touch. If you know someone that wants to join the network, give them my email. I hope FPRN can capture the momentum from last weeks event and continue to grow in order to help eradicate fuel poverty (and as someone said last week, put us all out of a job).

Kind regards,

Rob