The Fund has made its first grants!
Thank you donors!
Thank you all applicants for great proposals!
Many folks are familiar with the idea of a “carbon footprint” stomping on ecosystems. We like to think of these grants as our “ecosystem handprint” – the good we can do to improve health and resilience for ourselves and our environment.
On behalf of our generous supporters, we are proud to award four grants totaling $17,000. All projects satisfy our initiatives for impact, interconnection, and local to our Island neighbors. The Climate Fund Tech Team spent hours reviewing each project and talking with the applicants. The Fund's grants are restricted to charitable 501(c)(3) organizations, which has fortuitously created partnerships with fiscal sponsors that amplify the good works and benefit our community further. Here are the grantees.
The Hall is on a mission to be climate friendly and resilient. Through a series of upgrades to heating, cooking, and insulation, the non-profit community association will move the Hall away from burning propane, improve energy-efficiency, improve their capacity to act as a resilient community hub, and act as a showcase for making the switch from fossil fuels to clean electricity. This initiative will increase their ability to serve our community in the future, and will act as a catalyst for others in the community to undertake similar efforts. Plans include a new induction electric stove; new electric heat pump hot water heater; new heat pump heating/cooling system; solar/battery system; and energy efficiency improvements. The tech team imagined the impact if every community center on Whidbey followed suit!
partner: South Whidbey Tilth
The Farm in partnership with South Whidbey Tilth will provide training and education on integration of biochar into farming operations. Their work will include testing and analyzing data on unit emission reductions, biochar quality, and soil improvements for on-farm and large home garden applications. They expect to demonstrate the triple value proposition of GHG reduction, improved crop yields and immediate carbon sequestration. They will work with Kulshan Carbon trust to discover if we can do small-scale eco-credit valuation to incentivize implementation. The tech team liked all the collaboration proposed with this project and is already imagining multiple applications of the idea throughout the island.
This hard-working group has been collecting food scraps from a neighborhood in Langley for the past two years and turning them into compost. Through weekly curbside pickup they have diverted 4,000 lbs of household organics from the landfill. Their project is demonstrating the viability of a decentralized organic waste system to recover plant nutrients for local soils. The alternative would be an island-wide centralized facility which is challenging to get approved, and who wants it in their backyard? When scaled up, they will show how small communities can:
Reduce methane gas generated by rotting food waste in the Roosevelt Regional landfill.
Reduce carbon pollution produced when transporting organic waste off the island and compost onto the island.
Use compost to regenerate soil health, sequester carbon, and decrease the need for agrochemicals.
Reduce pressure on aquifers by using compost to increase the water holding capacity of agricultural soils.
They dream big and the tech team loved their vision.
partner: Whidbey Camano Land Trust
The Institute will work to revitalize two important ecosystems on Whidbey: Strawberry Point and the Keystone Preserve. PRI will expand their native seed production to provide WCLT with locally sourced restoration plant material. What excites us is the collaboration between these two important island organizations. This project achieves our goals of carbon sequestration, via habitat restoration, and carbon pollution reduction, via local sourcing of materials. Weaving volunteers into the work of restoring ecosystems is how we thrive on our Island together!
Over the next 12 months, we will publish progress reports in our monthly newsletter.
The Fund is just a year old, and look at
what we’ve done with contributions from only a score of donors!
What if we had 200 contributors?
The magic of these local projects is that we can actually SEE the results and enjoy the satisfaction of knowing WE helped make them happen. Are you inspired to support the spirit and passion in our community to make Whidbey more resilient to the shocks that climate change will bring? We invite you to help grow this fund so next summer we can boost twice as many worthy endeavors! Who can you share this opportunity with? Family and friends? Work colleagues Neighbors? Civic groups? Businesses? Church groups? If we all contribute a little bit, together we can do big work. The Whidbey Climate Fund belongs to the Whidbey community. It is US, taking charge of our own future and doing our own good work. As June Jordan wrote in Poem for South African Women, "We are the ones we have been waiting for."
Continue the work,
please DONATE for next year.