10 Local Champions Complete Training
Local Champions Working Group Meeting
Congratulations to our ten cohort members for a successful completion of the Local Champions program!! On April 25th and 27th they made presentations to audiences of roughly thirty community members, including local supervisors, mayors and municipal officials, about the climate actions they have completed and their roadmap ahead. This was the culmination of nine months of hard work!! These volunteers, from ten towns and villages, stepped up to partner with their municipalities in Columbia, Greene, Dutchess and Ulster counties as coordinators of their respective Climate Smart Community Task Forces. Deborah Conrad from the Town of Chatham and Bill Mancini from the Village of Kinderhook each led their municipalities to attain bronze certification in NY’s Climate Smart Communities program. And two other cohort members’ municipalities applied for bronze on July 7th.
Local Champions Hike
During the course of the program, Deborah and Bill worked on their bronze filings with our partners from the Capital District Regional Planning Commission. Our eight other members (Genevieve Glasson from the Village of Millbrook, Stacy Mantel from the Town of Amenia, Melissa Miller from the Town of Kinderhook, Tom Paino from the Village of Philmont, Teddy Secor from the Town of Stanford, Meg Todisco from the Village of Valatie, Margaret Tomlinson from the Village of Catskill, and JoAnne Warren from the Town of Shawangunk) worked with our partners at Cornell Cooperative Extension to complete inventories of actions their municipalities had done and plan to do.
From August 2022 through April 2023, our cohort met weekly to troubleshoot the intricacies of CSC actions, ways to engage their communities and how to map their municipality’s path forward while gaining buy-in of key stakeholders. Session topics included: how to work with Google Drive, civics 101, navigating difficult personalities, an intro to grants, a town case study, NY’s Climate Act, environmental justice and equity, and community organization. We were joined by eleven guest speakers and our partners from CDRPC and CCE regularly joined to provide dedicated assistance.
Local Champions Gathering
Members received free consultations with an engineering firm and a grant writer to aid them in assessing the feasibility and financing of desirable climate actions. Throughout the process they worked with their municipal stakeholders to document foundational work done, gain town board and village trustee approval, and make decisions on priority actions to pursue. Five of our cohort members received fellowships.
We gathered regularly for dinners and field trips. A final celebration was held on a farm in Greene County, where a seasoned herbalist led us on a foraging walk. Discoveries were turned into a shared feast.
Local Champion members gather for a celebratory dinner on a farm
Our Local Champions from Cycle 2 of our program will now be invited to join regular alumni calls with six Local Champions pilot cohort members. Our alumni receive preferential treatment when applying for future PCA programs and grant offerings. We consider them part of our community and look forward to future opportunities to connect and support them.
Bronze Roundup:
Six of the sixteen towns that have graduated from our Local Champions program have attained bronze with two additional alumni having filed in July of 2023.
Achieved Bronze Certification on March 23, 2022
Germantown (CSC Task Force Coordinator: Christina Bohnsack)
Achieved Bronze Certification on July 8, 2022
North East (CSC Task Force Coordinator: Kathy Chow)
Achieved Bronze Certification on April 21, 2023
Hurley (CSC Task Force Coordinator: Kristen Schara)
Union Vale (CSC Task Force Coordinator: (Jen Rubbo/Josh Redinger)
Chatham (CSC Task Force Coordinator: Deborah Conrad)
Kinderhook Village (CSC Task Force Coordinator: Bill Mancini)
Congratulations to all – we are so proud of these Local Champions and the meaningful climate action they have accomplished!!
