NY State’s Climate Smart Communities program (CSC) lays out a framework for volunteers and municipal leaders to work on climate change together at the local level. The program recommends over 100 actions—steps to take to transform into a more resilient and more energy efficient place to live. The CSC program, which has been around for about a decade, sits under seven NY State agencies, and has overlap with NYSERDA’s Clean Energy Communities program (CEC). When you complete CSC actions and submit a public filing with the documentation of those actions, you earn points towards certification. 120 points gets you to bronze certification, and beyond that, 300 points gets you to silver.

As of the New Year 2022, there are only 80 municipalities in NY State that have earned certification—only 8 of which have attained silver. 350 municipalities have taken the CSC pledge, passed the resolution, and registered on the CSC portal. Keep in mind that’s out of 3400 total municipalities in NY State!

In doing the CSC program, your municipality proves to its community that it’s taking climate change seriously and taking action. With Certification, you not only get bragging rights, but you also unlock preferred ranking when applying for DEC grant opportunities to further your sustainability goals. CSC is considered one of the best state level climate programs in the nation, and we want to help you get started.

The first step in becoming a climate smart community is for your town or village board to pass a resolution pledging to do the CSC program. In order to be eligible to apply to the Local Champions program, the applicant and their municipality are required to have passed that resolution. Our Local Champions will only be successful if they have proven support from their local government (CSC is, after all, a municipal government program).

If your local government has not yet passed the CSC resolution but you think they should—then get to it! The CSC website shares details about passing the resolution and provides a downloadable model resolution.

If our application timing will be too tight to pass the CSC resolution, but your local government intends to, you’re welcome to submit a letter of commitment to that effect, in advance of having passed the resolution. When you submit your application, you can upload that letter along with your signed Municipal Support Document (downloadable pdf linked on the Apply page).

Local Champions is open to applications from towns and villages in Dutchess, Columbia, Ulster, and Greene counties. We seek applications from municipalities that are new to the CSC program, and therefore can best take advantage of the “jumpstart” experience we’ve designed, including the Certification Assessment process with our partners at Cornell Cooperative Extensions, or bronze filing assistance with Capital District Regional Planning Commission. (See below for an explanation of the Certification Process.)

But who is the “local champion”? Climate Smart Communities Task Force Coordinators. Typically this is a volunteer in the community who is stepping up to lead in collaboration with local elected officials and municipal staff. Sometimes this person is an elected local official or a municipal employee. The CSC website has more details on the CSC Task Force Coordinator role.

While the CSC Task Force Coordinator is the applicant and if accepted, becomes one of the “local champions” in our cohort program, they’ll also need to work with their town elected officials on the Municipal Support Document piece of the application. The town should put forward an elected official to act as the Local Champion’s liaison during the application, and if accepted, throughout the program.

We expect participants to spend at least 10 hours a week on Local Champions programming and CSC for the duration of our program.

Throughout the program, we encourage your elected official liaison to participate as much as they can. Especially, during Module 1, during which eight of our Local Champions will be working on a Certification Assessment with a Cornell Cooperative Extension point person, and two of our Local Champions will be working on their bronze certification filings with Capital District Regional Planning Commission.

The Certification Assessment is the foundational process of understanding where your municipality is at in terms of their climate work. Our partners at Cornell Cooperative Extensions lead the process with a series of working sessions. The Local Champions serves as their point person, and you work as a group with your elected official liaison, oftentimes the Town or Village Clerk, and other stakeholders who have that institutional memory you’ll be calling upon. Together, you comb through the list of all the CSC actions and determine which have already been completed, what documentation is required, and how many points you have, vs. which actions have not been completed. In looking at the list of uncompleted actions, the group decides on recommendations for actions to pursue and prioritize. Thus, you build a roadmap towards your bronze certification in the CSC program.

We expect our Local Champions to devote 10 hours/week on 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 are invited to request an $8000 fellowship. The understanding is that the fellowship will be solely used to support the work of the local champion in helping the municipality achieve Climate Smart Communities bronze status.

Partners for Climate Action has a number of support programs available to members in our network. All of these support programs focus on getting climate work done in the Hudson Valley.

PCA has an application process for Ecological Restoration grants. PCA will review these applications and award grants.

PCA’s intern matchmaking service is made possible through a partnership with Bard College’s Center for Environmental Policy and Center for Economic and Environmental Partnership.

You may also apply for PCA to subsidize a grant writer to work with you on a project.

Completion of the Local Champions program results in preferred ranking when applying for these opportunities. More info can be found at Partners for Climate Action’s website.

For the most part, the program is designed to work remotely on Zoom. In order to not get “zoomed out,” sessions will be limited to no more than two hours per session.

If COVID does not foil our attempts at being embodied humans, we will host quarterly mixers—fun and casual networking events where participants come in person to chat with other members of the cohort, as well as Local Champions alumni, task force members, and other members of the PCA network. We are also planning no more than once a month in-person dinners or field trips for the cohort. These informal in-person meetups are great for those parking lot conversations, making connections, and serendipitous brainstorming.

Virtual sessions work well for the following aspects of the Local Champions program, where zooming in from across four counties is quite convenient:
-Trainings on technical skills
-Internal discussions, cohort check-ins, and final presentations
-Special guest round-tables where cohort members get to discuss topics with each other and the guest
-Cohort sessions to answer questions and check in on progress of the Local Champs

Whether the eight cohort members’ Certification Assessment sessions and the two cohort members’ bronze filing work are in person or via zoom will be up to your CCE or CDRPC point person, you, your stakeholders, and elected official liaison.

By agreeing to join the Local Champions program you must be fully committed to the program. We are only accepting a limited number into the cohort, and we need to prioritize space for those individuals who can begin the program fully committed to completing it. Participants are required to attend at least 75% of scheduled programming.

We do suggest that you have an “understudy”—a person ready to jump in if you’re unable to attend or complete the program. This understudy is welcome to participate alongside you in your Certification Assessment, Zoom programming, and Quarterly Mixers.

So many things! We have built in these pieces, freely included in the Local Champions pilot:
-A network of like-minded folks, working towards similar goals in the Hudson Valley
-An orientation to the CSC program, as well as to other resources available
-Either a Certification Assessment co-generated between you and Cornell Cooperative Extension’s experts OR bronze filing support from Capital District Regional Planning Commission
-Guest speakers and trainings as you dive into your actions and form your Climate Smart Task Force and commence community engagement
-Three consultations of one hour each with a technical consultant from engineering firm Tighe & Bond
-Grant writing consultation with an expert
-Guidance and cohort support as you create your roadmap and final presentation, which can dovetail with an application for PCA Ecological Restoration grants or other support opportunities
-Quarterly mixers, monthly field trips and dinners

Local Champions is not an official program of the NY State government. We created the Local Champions program to be aligned with and to support the pre-existing CSC program for municipalities.

Partners for Climate Action Hudson Valley is a non-profit initiative of the Local Economies Project of the New World Foundation. In developing Local Champions, we coordinated with the government employees that run CSC, as well as Clean Energy Communities and NGOs that also fund and support climate work in NY State. Local Champions is designed to act as a ramp onto CSC, to further the good work NY State and partnering NGOs are doing.