On our special Earth Day mini-episode, Ryan talks with Lynn Stoddard, the founder and executive director of Sustainable CT about helping the towns of Connecticut become cleaner, greener and more equitable for everyone.
On our special Earth Day mini-episode, Ryan talks with Lynn Stoddard, the founder and executive director of Sustainable CT about helping the towns of Connecticut become cleaner, greener and more equitable for everyone.
Michael Pierry
Hello and welcome to a special mini episode of The Hamden Library Podcast in celebration of Earth Day. I'm your host, Michael Pierry. And coming up in a second we have a special interview Ryan did with Lynn Stoddard, the founder and executive director of Sustainable CT. Lynn has over 25 years of experience in developing public policy and managing a broad range of environmental programs, and worked at the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection for many years in areas including climate change, energy efficiency, recycling, solid waste planning, pollution prevention, and coastal area management. She talks to us today about Sustainable CT, and how it helps the towns of Connecticut become cleaner, greener and more equitable for everyone. So without further ado, here is that interview, enjoy.
Ryan Keeler
This is Ryan with the Hamden Library Podcast and I'm with Lynn Stoddard, the executive director of sustainable CT. Hi, Lynn, how are you doing today?
Lynn Stoddard
On great, Ryan, thanks for having me.
Ryan Keeler
We're very happy to have you for a special episode of the podcast that is going to drop on Earth Day. And we want to start with having you talk a little bit about what Sustainable CT is.
Lynn Stoddard
Yeah, well, Sustainable CT is a statewide program to help all of our communities and towns across Connecticut become better places to live for all. So the way we do that is we provide a roadmap of best practices, there are actions that towns can take to provide support to implement those actions. And when towns implement a certain number of actions in different categories, they can earn certification to be recognized for the great stuff they're doing in their communities. So the action roadmap is really the ingredients that we think and towns gave us input on the important ingredients to make a town were resilient and thriving and welcoming for all residents. So it spans things way beyond environment. Towns that gets certified through a program have to show some action related to affordable housing, to advance their addressing homelessness, prevention, arts and culture, supporting local economies, clean transportation, and so on, as well as some of the more traditional environmental things like recycling and clean energy.
Ryan Keeler
So what do you do to facilitate this kind of stuff with the municipalities?
Lynn Stoddard
Yeah, so we provide a lot of support through Sustainable CT and our partners to help towns undertake these best practices. So for example, one of the actions is about Complete Streets. So that means improving the safety and making streets welcome for all users, not just cars, but those who are walking, biking, using transit, those who may be using a stroller or a cane. And so in this case, we help towns doing walking audit of their streets to understand the perspective of the users to actually get the users to get feedback on how the streets and sidewalks are working. And then the town's can actually make those improvements, their funding. In some cases, there are other partners we have that can help them implement improvements. So that's one example of kind of how we provide the support. We do lots of webinars, we share the great things towns are doing with other towns. So either through a webinar or a coffee hour or looking at their certification reports, towns can learn from each other and improve on or customize it for their own towns. So currently, we have 131 of the 169 municipalities across Connecticut who are participating in Sustainable CT and 59 of those have earned certification, which is an amazing feat, because they have to kind of show a lot of progress on these many different areas and document that.
Ryan Keeler
One of the things you guys do that I have attended myself is the coffee hour. And I wanted to give you a chance to maybe talk about that and when it is and maybe some people will be able to join that next time.
Lynn Stoddard
Yeah, so the coffee hour we actually started during COVID. It's a virtual coffee hour and we is just a way of connecting people with people in communities. Right now the coffee hour has evolved to the third Friday of each month at 10am. Again, it's virtual. And people can register by going to our website, www.sustainablect.org. We have a really exciting coffee hour coming up. In honor of Earth Day. It's on Friday, the day before April 21, at 10; our usual coffee our time. And we are featuring Eric Fein from the Yale program on climate change communication, to talk about how we all can provide compelling messaging and communication about the climate crisis crisis and inspire people towards action.
Last year, Sustainable CT launched a Climate Leaders designation in addition to our certification program. So towns that take actions that have a high greenhouse gas impact, get this extra kind of banner and acknowledgement of being Climate Leaders. We had five towns achieve Climate Leaders last year. And so this webinar is honoring Earth Day and our Climate Leaders series. And we had many webinars and coffee hours tailored towards the Climate Leaders designation as well as all of our actions. Yeah, so people should check those out every Friday, they're usually pretty informal, so that there's an opportunity for discussion in question and the answer to
Ryan Keeler
Absolutely, and Sustainable CT has a podcast of its own, right?
Lynn Stoddard
We do we have a podcast thing going probably about a year now that we have episodes monthly. And again, you can you can find it by getting on our website. And we feature sometimes we feature municipal leaders on cool things they're doing. We featured our climate or Sustainable CT fellows who are college interns that work with us all summer to help towns directly on implementing sustainability actions. Yeah, it's a great like, kind of focus on some of the programming we do.
Ryan Keeler
One of the things that I had noticed on your website that was new to me was the equity coaches. So I wanted to bring that up and let you talk a little bit about that as well.
Lynn Stoddard
Right. So I mentioned that sustainability is, we define it as all the ingredients that make a town a great place to live for all people, equity and inclusion has been a requirement of certification from the start. In fact, it's the only action that's required for certification, because we believe it's so important for communities to be welcoming and inclusive and provide access to our residents. Because that's a little harder than maybe doing a walk audit of your streets. Like I mentioned, for complete streets, it's a little harder to change your practices to make sure you're being informed the town's being informed by those who are most impacted by municipal decisions. We have a support tool, which is our equity coaches, we have six brand new equity coaches on contract. We've had them over the years, and this is a kind of a new cohort. And they're available at no cost to towns, we have grant funding to support this to kind of coach towns on how they might change a municipal program or decision through connecting with residents that are most impacted, listening to those residents and kind of CO creating solutions and changes in the way the town does something. So it's a really powerful program and great opportunity for towns, anyone who's interested in learning more about that and having their town paired with an equity coach can just email us at info at SustainableCT.org.
Ryan Keeler
And you mentioned complete streets and the equity component. What are some other certifications that towns looking to get into the first certifications? Like what are the basic kind of first things that towns might look to submitting?
Lynn Stoddard
Well, towns I mean, they have to do one thing and each of our action categories, so some of the simpler things are like holding a sustainability event. We also have actions related to like in every, every category, we have stepping stones so I mentioned affordable housing A high impact action might be increasing the percentage of affordable housing in your community through actual units of housing. But towns can step into this at a simpler level by looking at their housing data profile that's available for all towns. And we provide that through the partnership for strong communities a partnership we have with them, towns, looking at that understanding the housing situation in their community and having a community conversation about that. So really, within our certification program, there are these stepping stone actions of becoming more aware of an issue and having a conversation about it, and then moving into action that might have a greater impact over time. So there's a range of kind of dipping your toe in the water in any of these categories and topics that towns may not have done a lot of work in before. So we try to make the program very flexible and accessible to towns and meet them where they are. And the exciting thing is if towns come in because they're very interested in energy efficiency in their schools, they also will then have to look at homelessness issue in our community. And we've heard town say we didn't think we had a homelessness homeless issue. And we never would have looked at it. But we wanted to get certified. So we went to some training and learned that in fact, we actually do have people who are sleeping on couches or in cars, it might not be as obvious to us as, you know, tents on the in public spaces or something. So that's a really important design of our program, that we're introducing people to new topics in a way that they can get trained on them and understand them better so they can address them in your town.
Ryan Keeler
So what kind of things are coming up on your schedule that the public might want to be aware of?
Lynn Stoddard
Well, in addition to the Earth Day, coffee hour, I mentioned, one of the things we really want people to know about, especially related to taking action on and around Earth Day is our community match funds. So we have funding that we provide to communities to implement sustainability projects, any project that makes your town essentially a better place for for residents and businesses and so on. So the community match Fund is a simple grant, where anyone with a great idea for their town, talks to us by phone, and explains their idea. We say that sounds great. We'd love to support you, we set you up on our crowdfunding platform, coach you in crowdfunding, and then match every dollar you raise with $1 from Sustainable CT. So these are some examples of these projects are people who say, I wish there was more local food in my community, so they start a community garden, or there's a public space that's not attractive. Let's paint some murals to reflect the cultural background of our community and beautify it a little bit. Or we're really concerned about food waste and the waste crisis in Connecticut. How can we start a composting program for residents in our town or businesses in our town? And so we're going to be probably making some pitches around Earth Day to really engage people in leading community management projects, because everyone can think about an idea that would make their town a better place. And it's very simple. You don't have to be a town employee, you don't have to be a nonprofit, or a 501c3, it's anyone with a great idea that, you know, kind of matches our sustainable CT vision for communities. So we'd love to hear from people about that, you can contact us at info at sustainable ct.org. And we'll walk you through it. And we are having an event to on May 13 in Middletown, which is on our events website, to explain the community match fund and have people who lead projects, share their stories with people who might be interested in thinking about leaving a project and actually tour some local projects in Middletown.
Ryan Keeler
Excellent, we've got so much great information. I really hope people will take advantage of it. visit your website, attend the coffee hours, really look into the certifications. Thank you, Lynn, for joining us.
Lynn Stoddard
Thanks so much for the opportunity and Happy Earth Day, everyone.
Ryan Keeler
Happy Earth Day.
Michael Pierry
Well, that's it for our minisode of the Hamden Library Podcast. Thanks for listening. If you'd like you can drop us a line at HamdenLibraryPodcast@gmail.com We always welcome your feedback. We'll be back back with a regular new episode the first week of May