COMMUNITY CLIMATE COLLABORATIVE
Catalyzing climate action within local communities with a landscape analysis and roadmap for growth.
Challenge
The Community Climate Collaborative (C3) is a Charlottesville-based organization catalyzing climate action within local communities. This includes empowering residents and youth, advancing energy equity, helping businesses reduce carbon emissions and working with local governments to implement smart policies that center sustainable goals.
Experiencing success with its climate model in Charlottesville, C3 was looking for opportunities to expand its work to other localities in Virginia. Richmond was a natural choice because of the city’s readiness to scale up local climate action, including collective work done to craft RVAgreen 2050, the city’s equity-centered climate action plan.
C3 needed to gauge interest from the Richmond community before making a decision to expand programming to a new locality.
Our Approach
Shannon Strategies conducted a landscape analysis of Richmond’s climate justice work to identify key organizations and businesses with shared interests, outline the needs of the community and provide recommendations on growing the organization to a new locality.
Our analysis included listening sessions with City of Richmond staff, Richmond City Councilors and leaders at environmental justice, environmental education, transportation, and housing organizations. Using community connections and expertise in the environmental field, plus a familiarity with many of the city’s master plans, we were able to provide recommendations on how to build inroads into Richmond.
Results
Richmond organizations were open to a collaborative partnership with C3. Most stakeholders identified a need for an organization to act as a convener and bring a climate coalition together.
After reviewing the landscape analysis, C3 took the advice provided by our firm. The organization continued discussions with community leaders and developed a plan to supplement work happening in Richmond. Less than a year after providing our recommendations, the organization secured funding to hire personnel in Richmond and officially announced the next chapter of its local climate action programming at a meet and greet event with Richmond funders and advocates.
Overall, environmental organizations are hopeful about C3’s expertise and assets they bring to accelerate climate action in the city of Richmond.
