About

A short introduction to the Creation Care awards scheme

“The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it, the world and all who live in it” Psalm 24:1

The Creation Care scheme aims to encourage households to make changes to care for God’s earth. Wherever households are on their creation care journey, we want to provide ideas for their next steps, and recognise progress that’s made.

The scheme covers 7 areas of household life:

You can enter the scheme by completing a questionnaire that covers each of these areas. This will tell you how well your household is doing at each of these aspects of caring for creation, and hopefully give you ideas of ways you can improve.

Once you reach an award level, you can receive a certificate. Participating churches may give out these certificates during services. Don’t worry if your church isn’t participating, as you can still print off your certificate at home.

Award Levels

There are three main levels of awards: Gold, Silver and Bronze. Households that have completed the survey, and are working towards the bronze award level, but have not yet reached it, can receive a certificate for formally registering to be part of the scheme.

To get to bronze level overall, you need to have achieved at least bronze level in every area. Similarly for silver, you need to have reached at least silver level in each area. And for gold, you need to have reached at least gold level in every area. We’ve made gold really ambitious, so don’t be surprised if it takes you a while to get there. (NB. If you don’t have a garden, you won’t be penalised for not getting points in this area.)

We realise that not everyone will be able to reach silver or gold in all 7 areas of the scheme. Based on feedback we’ve received, we’ve introduced new ‘Commended’ and ‘Highly Commended’ certificates to recognise where households are doing really well in most areas, but not quite achieving silver or gold in other areas. To reach ‘Commended’ level, you need to achieve at least silver level 5 of the 7 areas, and to reach ‘Highly Commended’ you need to achieve gold level in 5 of the 7 areas.

How the scheme works

1. Register using the form on the Households page. You’ll then get sent a link by email to verify your account.

2. Once you’re registered and logged in, start by entering your household name, email address, and then type in how many people there are in your household.
If your church is already signed up to the scheme, you can also select it, or choose ‘Not Applicable’. Selecting your church.

3. Start to fill in the questionnaire
Pick an area  and start working your way through that.  
There are 122 questions in total, so it will take a while to complete the whole questionnaire. If that’s a bit overwhelming, work through a section at a time – you don’t need to do it all in one go. You can save your progress using the “Save” button

4. Keep track of your progress using the Overview page, which will update to show how you’re doing in each area.

5. Once you’ve completed your questionnaire, press ‘View certificate’ to download your certificate.
If you’re linked to a participating church, your church’s contact person for the scheme will receive a copy of your household’s certificate, which they may give to you at an appropriate service or event.
Please ask your church’s contact for the scheme for more information on how they plan to do this.

What will you do with my questionnaire data?

We will use your questionnaire data to administer the awards. We will not share your responses with others. If your church is taking part in the scheme, and you link your account to them, we will inform the contact person for your church when you achieve a certificate, so they can arrange to award these to you during a service. They will not be able to see your responses to questions. Read more information about our privacy policy.

Your data is held safely on our database and can be removed/deleted upon request.

If you link your account to a church that is part of the Salvation Army, a few staff from the Salvation Army head office will also be able to see your username, household name and award level, and when you last logged on to the site, so they can monitor how many people from the Salvation Army are taking part, and what award level they are at. They will not be able to see your responses to questions.