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Environmental Policymakers |
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Environmental policies create more than environmental benefits or environmental winners and losers.
Environmental policies also create economic benefits, and economic winners and losers. With the rise of sustainability, environmental policymakers pay more and more attention to creating these economic benefits. Verde wants them to pay more attention to the economic winners and losers.
Verde works with many partners, developed through our other outreach activities, to educate environmental policymakers about practices which help ensure that the green economy creates economic opportunities for low-income people and people of color, and which build environmental wealth in disadvantaged communities.
Current activities include:
- Clean Energy Works
- Grey-To-Green
- EcoDistricts
Clean Energy Works Oregon is the next stage in Clean Energy Works Portland/CEWP, a pilot program to weatherize up to 500 qualified Portland homes through on-bill financing. CEWP was guided by an innovative Community Workforce Agreement, developed through a collaboration of community groups, labor, trainers, and contractors.
With a $20 million grant from the US Department of Energy, Clean Energy Works Oregon expands the CEWP model, and will serve thousands of Portland-area homes and other Oregon jurisdictions. Verde’s CEWO advocacy ensures that the Community Workforce Agreement’s standards apply to scaled-up local and statewide activities, and ensure greater participation by low-income and people of color homeowners.
Portland’s Grey-to-Green Initiative is a 5-yr, $50 million investment to expand the City’s green infrastructure. We focus on 2 Grey-to-Green programs which create economic opportunity, but have no provisions to promote workforce diversity or participation by minority-owned and women-owned businesses: (i) The 1% for Green Fund supports construction of Green Street facilities.
It is available to pay for green infrastructure facilities that manage stormwater and provide other environmental benefits; (ii) The Ecoroof Incentive offers an incentive (up to $5 per square foot) to property owners and developers to add more ecoroofs.
Portland Sustainability Institute’s EcoDistrict Initiative imagines a neighborhood or district with a broad commitment to improve its environmental performance. These Eco-districts are being conceived and designed for economic development and for environmental protection. They are not being designed with low-income people and people of color in mind, with equity in mind.
In response, we propose a community-based approach, an anti-poverty approach where an EcoDistrict is a strategy to build environmental wealth in a low-income community. Verde and partners will:
- Designate and plan an EcoDistrict in Cully;
- Focus on practices that produce economic and environmental benefits for Cully’s low-income people and people of color;
- Build the capacity of minority-owned and women-owned businesses to design and deliver these environmental assets.
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