—Please think of the form linked below as a way for us to get to know you as a volunteer Climate Smart Communities Task Force Coordinator.
—Collaboration with your elected official liaison on the form is encouraged, especially the pieces about your municipality’s experiences.
—You must be the one candidate from your municipality (i.e. you’re not competing with another candidate to be your town’s Local Champion).
—We recommend you draft your responses offline before starting work on the online form to avoid any browser-based loss of work. (Here’s a printable PDF).

Please note that your elected official liaison must fill out this portion of the application materials. This serves to document the municipality’s desire for you to participate and their understanding of their own participation in stakeholder meetings and as your liaison.

Please submit the Municipal Support Document as part of your application materials by emailing vanessa@climateactionhv.org.

We designed Local Champions with the acknowledgement that it is a lot of work. Our expectation is that you’re devoting 10 hours a week for the duration of the program. Partners for Climate Action is committed to supporting equity in climate change work. If money is a barrier to the participation of selected applicants in this program, they can request an $8000 fellowship.

We will provide the option, to accepted applicants, of requesting a fellowship. The form below will be live after we select applicants.

For the 2022/2023 program, we will select up to 10 applications from the counties of Dutchess, Columbia, Greene, and Ulster.
Partners for Climate Action and our Selection Committee will review applications.
We will notify the 10 selected Local Champions by the end of June, and we’ll update our website here once their acceptance is finalized.

Don’t be shy about your needs. In many cases, there’s no “right” answer to these questions. Keep in mind, we want to bring together a diverse cohort of Local Champions who can learn from each other and benefit from this jump-start program we’ve designed.

The Local Champions program is provided by Partners for Climate Action, an initiative of the Local Economies Project of the New World Foundation—a foundation that is rooted in a long tradition of advancing economic equity, democratic rights, and civic participation in the United States. The New World Foundation (NWF) strengthens community-based organizations and local leadership. As a national community foundation, NWF works from the bottom up to build coalitions around issues that converge in place, creating alliances locally and building movements nationally: the essential ingredients of a working democracy.

While the Local Champions pilot is not sponsored by or affiliated with any NY State agency or department, we have aligned with the official Climate Smart Communities program to ensure our efforts bolster the coordinated support in the region.

May 2, 2022, by 5pm