Community Climate Action Projects
What is a community climate action project?
Community climate action can be many things!
At Camp, you’ll be focused on creating or continuing to develop a project that is specific to one or more communities, capable of making a meaningful impact on the lives of people and their environment, and aligned with the values that Footprints holds dear: accessibility, collectivity, compassion, confidence, humility, reciprocity, and resilience.
When you arrive to camp, your project can be at any stage of development: from just an idea to an existing organization or career. Camp provides you structure to discover your personal motivations and build your project with intention. Why now? What’s realistic? How will you measure success?
We help you answer these questions and develop a strategic action plan that scopes your work, identifies your stakeholders, and charts a clear path forward.
What makes a great project?
1) Personal connection and emphasis on collectivity
We love projects that are geographically specific — the more local, the better! But not all communities are spatial: for example, if you’re creating a non-profit organization that supports sustainable fashion designers, your community might not be a city, but a group of people. Either way, we're not just looking to help you accomplish an individual action; the Camp experience is built to help you spur collective action.
2) Opportunity for impact
Some climate problems are extremely complex, multi-system, existential behemoths. Other issues (say, a local irrigation problem due to drought) could be fixed within a few months given the proper resources. Camp is a place to think about and shrink the distance between the problems we face, big and small, by thinking strategically. Great project proposals, no matter how realistic or audacious, highlight possible challenges and limitations as well as realistic opportunities for impact.
3) Conscious of inequities and committed to justice
Climate action that is not equitable is not action at all. Great project proposals take into account personal privileges and biases, describe a plan to seek out and partner with experts, and may consider those most impacted by climate change and environmental injustice. Unsure if the project you have in mind is what we’ve described? Check out our values here.
Agriculture & Land Use
Few aspects of climate change are as personal as the food we eat and the land we live on. We work with people and organizations rooted in their communities and passionate about land, water, and other resources critical to life. Explore some of the agriculture, food systems, and land management projects our alumni have developed and then create your own!
Alumni spotlight
Austin Meyer ('22 Colorado) is on a quest to use writing, filmmaking, and improv comedy to help people shift to vegan diets — the most impactful diet choice possible for reducing carbon emissions. This work requires nuance and empathy, reflecting the complex mixture of tradition, identity, and culture that underpins our relationship to food.
Here’s Austin’s story of his week at Footprints in his own words.
Alumni spotlight
Board Member Brianna R. Pagán, PhD, is the Deputy Manager at NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration Goddard Earth Sciences (GES) Data and Information Services Center (DISC).
She combined her hobby, career and passion by making a map of climate change impacts to the Western States Endurance Run (WSER) course in the Sierra Nevada foothills in partnership with Footprints, an incubator for climate action and Dirtbags Run. WSER is the oldest 100-mile race in the United States.
Art & Communications
Climate solutions aren’t that helpful if nobody knows about them. But communication goes much deeper than information: it connects people to people, people to place, people to history. The best climate solutions bring people together, and sharing the human experience through self-expression is the best way to do that. At Footprints, we don’t just create solutions; we find the best ways to share them too. How would you share your passion for the world around you?
Alumni spotlight
Guided by his passion for filmmaking, Nemo Cionelo ('21 Colorado) is developing a short film to highlight underserved youth in New Mexico and how running connects and gives them purpose.
This Land is a short film by Faith Briggs that communicates many of the themes related to diversity, inclusivity, and belonging that Nemo is exploring.
Although many of us are passionate outdoor athletes, indoor spaces define much of our lives. With the right forethought and technology, we have the capability to design the built environment to be seamless with the outdoors, a net-positive space that complements and even contributes to the outdoor spaces that make us who we are. Check out these great initiatives that use the outdoors to help inform the indoors.
Built Environment
Alumni spotlight
Hannah Shew ('21 Colorado) developed a campaign to get her university to install a green roof on one of the campus buildings. At camp, she worked through how to communicate the varied benefits of green roofs — the environmental benefits green roofs can have for energy efficiency and pollinator habitat, the economic benefit of decreased energy costs, and the social benefits that exposure to nature and engagement with maintaining the green plants could have for students. She workshopped how to communicate all this to a variety of stakeholders, and after going home, parlayed the work into a job with the university's sustainability office — where she continues to advocate for the project.
Case study
Project URBINAT — Urban Innovative & Inclusive Nature — is a pilot project in Spain that brings together representatives of the local District Municipality, the URBINAT project, technicians, urbanists, academics, local NGOs, and concerned private citizens in collaborative dialogue to make decisions about the project’s urban interventions.
Collectively, they co-select and co-create solutions — such as green walls, alternative currency models like time banks, temporary marketplaces, and urban parks — according to their specific needs, ambitions, and realities on the ground. The aim is nothing less than a collective re-imagining of what the urban space can and should look like in terms of supporting individual, social, and environmental health.
We are lifelong learners at Footprints, and our goal is to help our campers do two things: create robust, community-centered climate projects, and educate people to understand and participate in these projects. We prioritize education because we believe in the future, and the mentors and collaborators involved with Footprints all participate in education in some way.
Education
Alumni spotlight
Luke Foley and Zoe Pritchard (both '22 CO) both tackled climate action through the lens of education.
Luke fine-tuned his small business that provides professional development for teachers focused on sustainability, environmental stewardship, and experiential learning. He is passionate about how this work connects teachers with the places that they can (and should) take their students, and multiplies his impact far beyond his own classroom.
Zoe developed a high-school-level curriculum to teach climate change in a project based, regionally relevant format. Her goal was to ground the curriculum in collective action and the emotional realities of discussing climate change with students. She loves how this work can guide students to feel empowered, informed, and hopeful. She will make the curriculum freely available online, too, so other teachers can spread those feelings as well.
Conversations about climate change often focus on energy because energy production is one of the chief contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. The solution to this problem is a transition from fossil fuel energy to renewables like wind, solar, and geothermal, and the good news is that these technologies already exist and are capable of supplying all the world’s energy needs. We work with runners and organizations to accelerate that transition so we can reduce emissions, clean up air and water, and provide stable and well-paying jobs for millions.
Energy
Case study
Community Resilience Hubs (CRHs) are physical sites where residents can access crucial services during a large-scale emergencies like flooding and heat waves.
In Millvale, PA, local government, emergency services, and community-development nonprofits came together to create a CRH that not only provides services during emergencies, but also addresses local food insecurity and underemployment. Community-based stakeholders collectively developed a vision that included food access and education as well as renewable energy workforce development.
Business and the economy have provided us with previously-unimaginable skills and opportunities. In order to continue this improvement of the world’s quality of life, we need to radically rethink how the economy works so that it will work for everyone. At Footprints, we help runners develop projects that support their communities as well as their own needs by using business practices that take a holistic view of the economy. How might you create profit while benefiting the world around you?
Industry
Case study
Patagonia
In September 2022, Patagonia hit the world with an eco-bombshell: the company's founder, Yvon Chouinard, and the rest of the Chouinard family were giving the company away. Ownership of Patagonia, valued at about $3 billion, would irrevocably go to a specially designed trust and a nonprofit organization.
Both entities were created to preserve the company’s independence and ensure that all of its profits — some $100 million a year — are used to combat climate change.
This move is unprecedented for a company of Patagonia's size and influence, and forces other companies to confront how they will reconcile their own business models with their stated goals of addressing the climate catastrophe.
Patagonia's mantra is "in business to save our home planet" — now, they're putting their entire business where their mouth is.
Case study
Ecovative
Ecovative is in the business of disruption. They pioneered the art and science of growing complete structures with mycelium — the root structures of mushrooms. They up-cycle agricultural byproducts from local farms as feedstock, then coax the mycelium into a variety of products that replace plastics, leather, meat, packaging, and other unsustainable products of industry and factory farming.
They use cutting edge biotechnology to amplify the natural properties of specific mushroom strains — pliability, water resistance, insulation, or tensile strength, for instance — to create an astounding array of mycelial-based, biodegradable, cost-effective products.
How do you grow products out of mycelium, anyway?
As runners, we know all about movement. And it’s not difficult to see that people are in motion around us all the time. Transportation is one of the largest contributors to climate change and air quality issues, but the solutions already exist to allow us to live mobile lives without causing these problems. Explore the work being done by our partners and others to see how you can create a project helping people transport themselves and their goods in climate-friendly ways.
Transportation
Case study
Montgomery County, MD school buses
On a typical school day in Montgomery County, Maryland, school buses use approximately 17,000 gallons of diesel fuel — enough fuel to power about 35 Americans' transportation needs for a whole year. To combat this, a group of local citizens persuaded the school board to replace all of its 326 diesel school buses with electric models.
It's the biggest single-district project in the country to swap combustion-engine school buses for electric vehicles.
Diesel engines account for almost a quarter of the U.S. transportation sector’s annual GHG emissions, and the move will also protect children from diesel fumes, which can trigger asthma and increase the risk of cancer.
The school district can also use the bus batteries and charging stations during the summer to provide the electrical grid with storage capacity. The buses will charge up in the middle of the night when energy demand is low, then sell that power back to the grid.
