Building Something Bigger Than Ourselves
Citizen Solar is a co-operative
A cooperative is a business or organization owned and democratically controlled by its members, who use its services or work in it. Members share decision‑making and benefit from the enterprise’s surplus rather than external shareholders.
“When you join a co-operative, you join a global movement that’s building a better world.”
Let’s co-operate and we can change the world!
Our offer to join us as members is coming soon. To register your interest contact us to let us know. We will be in touch once the offer is live.
Credit: ‘Co-operatives: Owned by our Members‘ was commissioned by Co-operatives UK and produced by Media Co-op thanks to grant funding from The Co-operative Bank. We’re also grateful to the Co-operative College, Co-operative Heritage Trust and Co-op News for their role in the development of the film. The film is narrated by broadcaster and TV producer Karen Gabay.
Who is behind the Citizen Solar Co-operative?
Meet the Board
Citizen Solar is led by four founding directors who bring together a wide range of professional skills and life experience. Together their combined experience spans across environmental sustainability, psychology, social work, scientific research, healthcare, governance, community development, public service, communications, project management and the voluntary sector. Read more about us in our individual bios below.
Co-founding Director & Director of Operations
John Booth
John brings more than five decades of environmental campaigning, community action and public service experience to Citizen Solar, combined with extensive experience in frontline healthcare, community engagement and project delivery.
John’s involvement in environmental campaigning began in the 1970s with Friends of the Earth and subsequently included work supporting Greenpeace UK, Greenpeace International and the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA). His experience spans campaigning, fundraising, public engagement, media and documentary work, environmental investigation and international advocacy.
During this period John took part in direct environmental campaigns in Britain and internationally. His work included protests against seal culling in Orkney and climbing industrial chimneys in the UK and across Europe with Greenpeace during campaigns highlighting acid rain and industrial pollution. He also worked with Greenpeace International and Greenpeace Germany on an investigation into an Icelandic-Japanese whale-smuggling operation.
A particularly formative period of John’s environmental work involved campaigns against commercial whaling. Working initially on behalf of another environmental organisation, John spent two months travelling through Norway from one fishing community to another, gathering intelligence about the Norwegian whaling fleet and its activities.
On returning to the UK, John and his colleagues approached environmental investigator Allan Thornton and his team and offered to share the intelligence they had gathered. This led to John being invited to join the crew of the Balaenoptera on a subsequent mission to Norway.
The expedition combined investigation with documentary work and the principle of “bearing witness”—going directly to where environmental harm was taking place, documenting what was happening and gathering evidence that could be communicated to the wider public and used to press for change.
Following the Norway mission, John was invited to join the team’s investigation of the pilot-whale hunt in the Faroe Islands. These pioneering investigations formed part of the early development of what became the Environmental Investigation Agency and its first major international campaigns against commercial whaling.
These experiences had a lasting influence on John’s approach to environmental action: understand the problem, go to where it is happening, gather evidence, communicate what you find and use that evidence to bring about practical change.
John’s environmental work subsequently developed from campaigning and investigation into environmental policy, sustainability and community participation.
Following the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development—the Rio Earth Summit—John worked with the United Nations Environment and Development UK Committee (UNED-UK), which was involved in promoting the implementation of Agenda 21 and Local Agenda 21 in the UK.
As a consultant, John worked with Essex County Council and local authorities across Essex to help officers and elected members understand the principles emerging from Agenda 21 and begin translating them into practical local action. This included supporting approaches to sustainable development, community participation and consultation, and helping councils consider how global environmental commitments could be implemented at local level.
This experience reinforced a principle that continues to shape John’s work today: major environmental challenges require national and international leadership, but successful solutions ultimately depend upon action within communities and the involvement of local people in the decisions that affect them.
Alongside his environmental work, John spent 22 years working in frontline NHS roles, including Accident and Emergency departments and hospital nurse bank services. This provided first-hand experience of health inequalities, vulnerability and the realities faced by people living through difficult circumstances. It also strengthened his understanding of the close relationship between people’s health, their homes, their income and the communities in which they live.
John has also worked with third-sector organisations, universities and local authorities on community engagement, sustainability, research and public consultation projects. His experience includes coordinating multi-partner initiatives, communicating complex subjects to the public and supporting communities to participate meaningfully in environmental decision-making.
More recently, John returned to the frontline of environmental action through community energy. He first discovered the community energy movement while researching and writing the Boiling Frogs blog with his life partner Maja Boznakova. Their exploration of practical, community-led responses to the climate and environmental crisis introduced them to the potential of community energy—not simply as a way of generating renewable electricity, but as a means of tackling fuel poverty, strengthening communities and giving local people a greater stake in the transition to a low-carbon future.
This discovery led John into practical community-energy work. Since 2024 he has worked with Community Energy Pathways delivering community energy and fuel-poverty projects across Essex. Through the UK Power Networks-funded Powering Down programme, he has supported community engagement, helped develop Energy Champion networks and worked alongside voluntary-sector and community partners to reach residents needing practical help with their energy costs.
This experience contributed to the creation of Citizen Solar and represents another stage in an idea that has run throughout John’s environmental work for more than fifty years: global environmental challenges ultimately have to be translated into practical action within communities.
As Operations Manager and a co-founding director of Citizen Solar, John supports project delivery, partnerships, community engagement and organisational development. His combination of environmental campaigning and investigation, local-government sustainability work, public service, healthcare experience and practical community delivery provides Citizen Solar with a strong connection between climate action, social justice and community resilience.
For John, Citizen Solar represents a continuation rather than a departure from his earlier environmental work—from campaigning and bearing witness to environmental problems, through helping local authorities and communities respond to the commitments of Agenda 21, to helping communities develop and ultimately own practical solutions to today’s energy and climate challenges.
Co-founding Director & Company Secretary
Maja Boznakova
Maja was born in 1979 in then-communist Czechoslovakia. She finished her compulsory education and left to live and work in the hospitality sector across Europe—honing her skills in four European languages and developing a refined palate for wine tasting. She believed becoming a sommelier at a prestigious 5-star hotel nestled in the mountains of Northern Italy would be her lifelong path.
But life had other ideas.
In 2004 Maja came to the UK and, and as she puts it, buried her head in books for the next 12 years. She completed a BSc in Neuroscience at University College London and an MSc in Bioinformatics at Birkbeck, University of London. With the intention to apply all she had learnt she was embarking on an MPhil at the University of Cambridge with a progression to a PhD while still raising her daughter as a single mother. The plan was to make the world a better place by researching the importance of play in education and becoming an advocate for free-thinking approaches to childhood and education.
Then theory became personal.
Her own seven-year-old daughter began experiencing school refusal. Faced with what she had come to understand about the shortcomings of conventional education, Maja made a life-changing decision. She stepped away from the academic career she had worked hard to build—including a nine-year position as a Research Assistant in a neuroscience laboratory—to give her daughter the opportunity to live and learn without school through home education.
Around this period Maja met her partner John Booth. Their different backgrounds and experiences brought them to many of the same questions about the environmental and social challenges facing the world and, increasingly, what ordinary people could actually do about them. They experimented with conventional campaigning, including becoming involved with Extinction Rebellion, but increasingly came to believe that their own contribution needed to be more practical and more local.
In 2022 they established Boiling Frogs Ltd and their Boiling Frogs blog became a place to explore that journey: the environmental and social problems confronting society, why change can be so difficult, and what practical alternatives might look like.
The way to fight back has began to get clearer for Maja in the last two busy years: balancing two nanny jobs, facilitating her daughter’s home education, completing a Permaculture Design Course in Cornwall, joining the Southend Tree Warden Scheme to care for young trees in her neighbourhood, and finally entering the Community Energy movement. She trained and took on a position as an Energy Champion in 2024, helping people across Essex reduce their energy bills since then. Community energy brought together many of the threads she had been exploring: environmental action, social justice, community participation and practical solutions that ordinary people could help create themselves.
In 2026 her successful home education duties have come to an end, and this is when Citizen Solar is born. What lies ahead for our children and us? How will we prepare? Maja’s answer is clear: with Citizen Solar.
Co-founding Director & Chairman
Ian Noble
Ian brings extensive experience in environmental campaigning, social justice, community development and voluntary sector leadership.
Born in Eastwood and raised around Westcliff and Southend, Ian retains strong local connections, and a deep commitment to the communities Citizen Solar aims to support.
As Chair of Citizen Solar, Ian provides strategic leadership, supports good governance and ensures that community voice, inclusion and social value remain central to the organisation’s decisions.
His experience in supporting vulnerable communities, developing projects and building partnerships strengthens Citizen Solar’s ability to deliver meaningful and inclusive community energy solutions.
Ian began as an environmental campaigner in the 1980s. As a Greenpeace activist he was involved in direct action protests against nuclear weapons testing and was involved in the Greenpeace campaign to expose the cruelty of captive ceteceans – dolphins and orcas being held in pleasure parks and zoos for entertainment. He was also a member of the crew of the Greenpeace yacht ‘Rubicon’ as it researched the dangers posed to seals, and the wider environment by marine fish farms around the west coast of Scotland in 1987. Ian was also part of the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) campaign team on the Faroe Isles in 1985 exposing the slaughter of pilot whales.
Ian’s concerns about environmental justice expanded to broader, interconnected issues of social justice, oppression and empowerment and in the late 1980s he became increasingly aware of the institutionalisation of people with profound learning disabilities in long stay hospitals. As a consequence, he joined a groundbreaking project supporting deafblind rubella young adults, and their families, as they transitioned from long stay hospitals into community-based living. He qualified as a social worker (DipSw) in the mid-1990s and, as a communication support and behaviour specialist, he gained MSc in Applied Psychology of Learning Disability from University of Portsmouth in 2002. He presented his Masters research to the International Association of Scientific Study of Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (IASSIDD) in Montpelier (2004) and worked alongside colleagues in France, Denmark, Italy Holland and Japan. He was involved in the delivery of vocational qualification programmes for deafblind practitioners and social care workers including as an External Quality Assurance verifier. Over 33 years his career involved direct support, project development, senior management, research, grants, funding.
Having learned how often marginalised people’s voices can go unheard – Ian worked for the past ten years as a freelancer with third sector and community groups on a range of video projects – supporting people whose voices are often unheard to tell their stories.
As well as enjoying more free time as a musician, writer and photographer, Ian is now focussed on local community and environmental projects, including a community garden which grows food for local residents, and a community Larder. Through this work he has seen first-hand the challenges facing residents experiencing financial hardship, food insecurity and energy poverty.
Co-founding Director & Treasurer
Ian Hall
Ian brings nearly four decades of public service experience to Citizen Solar with expertise in financial management, statistics, compliance, auditing, investigation, training and public accountability.
He worked as a civil servant from 1977 until 2016, holding a range of roles across government, including with the Ministry of Defence and HM Customs & Excise (latterly HM Revenue and Customs). During his career, his responsibilities included financial controls, statistical analysis, monitoring financial declarations, controlling regulated goods, in particular alcohol and tobacco and ensuring compliance with complex legislation. He also prepared information used to support government decision-making.
Ian developed experience in professional training, designing and delivering events for colleagues within HMC&E/HMRC covering the storage and movement of regulated goods. Throughout his career, his work demanded accuracy, integrity, attention to detail, and the careful stewardship of public resources.
This experience provides Citizen Solar with valuable skills in financial oversight, organisational accountability and effective governance. As Treasurer, Ian supports the Board in maintaining sound financial management and ensuring that the organisation’s resources are used responsibly and deliver maximum benefit for the communities it serves.
Away from finance and governance, Ian is also a poet with a particular liking for limericks. His lifelong support of Newcastle United has brought many ups and downs which have amongst other things taught him to treat triumph and disaster with a pragmatic approach. He brings creativity, warmth, pragmatism, humour, and optimism to the Board alongside his more formal skills—a useful reminder that building a successful community organisation requires people as well as spreadsheets.