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| Three Spheres |
Campaigns - The Ultimate Collaborative Platform
Campaigns are the highest level of the Envirolution platforms. Campaigns bring all the other platforms together; included in each campaign is a website to connect the campaign, an event to kick it off, multiple school clubs to organize and implement projects, and a variety of programs for real action. Campaigns are designed to be larger in scale and community-wide, customized for your community, whether it is a school, neighborhood, city, or state. Each campaign targets local community organizations, like social clubs, non-profits, job training organizations or religious institutions to anchor the message. The campaign also targets local municipality and governmental boards, large corporate sponsors, and technical stakeholders to provide endorsement and support. As with all other platforms, the campaigns must Educate, Unite, Take Action and incorporate all Three Spheres. Campaigns mobilize a wide array of interests under one common mission and usually occur over at least one year.
Campaigns have large, measurable goals that account for all Three Spheres. They take all the best from the other collaborative platforms and bring it together to mobilize an entire community. Typically the campaigns seek to:
- Educate and train youth,
- Realize emission reductions,
- Engage business owners,
- Foster community engagement,
- Facilitate green job training and employment opportunities,
- Incite interest through marketing, and
- Promote implementation methods.
An example of a campaign can be a school wide effort engaging students, faculty, and administration around reducing waste and increasing recycling, or the Win-Win community wide small businesses upgrade campaign.
Campaigns are facilitated, promoted and managed by the Envirolution administration and our goal is to bring the different roles and players to the table to fulfill all the specific needs of each campaign. Using experts and encouraging collaboration is the foundation for the campaigns.
The Win-Win Campaign: Save Money. Save the Planet
Starting this summer, Envirolution, in collaboration with the Lower East Side Ecology Center and various other notable organizations, business and individuals, is piloting a small business sustainability auditing and green jobs training program in the east village. The idea is to train high school and college students to perform small business sustainability assessments, and then have them engage, audit and help as many small businesses in their neighborhood go green as possible.
The program is designed to be flexible in terms of implementation, but we will be piloting it as a 3 month summer program: 4 weeks of training and an 8 week internship working in the field. The training will broken down into four parts: 1) Context & Opportunities; 2) Energy Auditing; 3) Sustainability Auditing [including waste, transportation, water, procurement]; and 4) Sales & Marketing
The plan is to train thirty students from the East Village neighborhood--10 college and 20 high school. Once trained, the auditors will break up into ten teams of three--one college student and two high school students per team. These teams will compete against each other to see which team can: 1) audit & rate the most businesses; 2) reduce the most energy usage; and 3) reduce the most emissions. The goal of the program is to audit 20% of the 750+ businesses in our target region (from 2nd Ave to Ave D, and from East 6th St to East 14th Street), which is about 150 business. To achieve this, each team will need to do at least 2 audits per week.
The main objective is to achieve an average of 20% energy use-reduction, and 30% reductions in emissions per participating business.
The benefits include:
- Reducing climate-change-causing and health-harming greenhouse gases and other airborne pollutants.
- Promoting sustainability and the green economy: energy efficiency, green jobs, green businesses, renewable energy, green purchasing/consumer power
- Targeting the often overlooked small business sector
- Helping businesses save money by lowering electricity bills
- Empowering youth
- Workforce--green collar job--training & development
- Full community involvement and collaboration (i.e. multi-stakeholder engagement): Individuals, businesses (small and large), non-profits, and government agencies
- Cross-generational-collaboration
- Targeting the biggest cause of emissions in NYC: existing buildings ...... which produce 79% of all NYC's GHG emissions.
Our Partners:
- New York State Energy Resource and Development Agency (NYSERDA) through their Energy $mart program
- EME Group (environmental engineering consulting company) with the energy auditing
- Community Energy with the renewable energy
- Green Maps for the mapping
- DoRight Enterprises for youth sustainability auditing training
- Climate Counts for the rating system
- Evolvist.com with the website
Our vision for this program is to create a model that can be fine-tuned and replicated throughout the city and beyond.
Though there are clearly more than just two benefits, we believe that the simple "win-win" says it all. You can literally save money (and find ways to make money) while helping save the environment and lift up our communities.