Funding Community-Led Climate Action

Dianne Hills is the executive director of My Brother’s Table, a soup kitchen and service agency serving residents in Lynn, on the North Shore of Massachusetts. Through her work, she has witnessed the burdens residents of her city bear when it comes to climate impacts. Extreme heat has been especially harmful for the community.

“I’ve been a part of a group working on climate change adaptation and resilience, particularly around responding to extreme heat events in our community,” Hills says. “In Lynn, we have many people who are high risk for heat-related illnesses because of existing conditions. It doesn’t help that our city’s characteristics—sparse vegetation, inadequate shade, heat-absorbing infrastructure and lack of access to air conditioning—put residents at additional risk.”

Communities and Climate Challenges

Hills' community isn’t the only one facing challenges from the effects of climate change. Recent years have brought people across Massachusetts and beyond face-to-face with the current and future realities, from heat stress and poor air quality to extreme weather and flooding. More intense impacts often affect communities that don’t always have the resources available to manage them or recover after an event.

Residents of many communities are rarely included in conversations and decisions about the resources and solutions needed to address climate change impacts. Yet, they are the witnesses to what’s happening on the ground—their understanding of the community, its assets and challenges are critical. Since we must build a more resilient future for all, it is essential for communities to have input in the decisions that affect them.

Weaving Community Resilience Into Climate Funding

It’s about a combination of developing solutions and allocating resources for climate adaptation. Organizations like Groundwork Lawrence, My Brother’s Table and countless others who are embedded in addressing the challenges their communities face haven’t always been invited to or included in the critical convening of local leaders that shape the funding and tools for addressing the causes and impacts of climate change. The funding that is available is often hard for communities to access and has restrictions or requirements that can make it harder for community-based organizations to meet their unique combination of needs, opportunities and challenges. 

Given Massachusetts’ commitment to addressing climate change—with robust 2030 and 2050 targets, plans and policies—it is essential that communities are front and center throughout the process of developing and implementing solutions. In working alongside the state toward these climate goals, The Nature Conservancy, other environmental organizations and community-based organizations noticed the gap in state initiatives to effectively meet the funding needs of communities so they can prepare, respond and recover from the impacts of extreme weather events.

“Current funding and programs for climate mitigation and adaptation often do not meet community needs,” says Emma Gildesgame, climate adaptation director for TNC in Massachusetts. “So, we partnered with community-based organizations to learn from them and start working differently to get better results.”

Partnerships and Processes

Since 2019, a core team of conservation and community-based organizations convened by TNC has come together with the goal of securing additional funding for community-based solutions to improve resiliency and address the impacts of climate change. In direct partnership with community organizations and residents, the core team assessed the existing funding gaps and identified opportunities to improve what’s already in place. 

A funding consultant also generated several proposed solutions for sustainable funding. The team then settled on a solution that places a fee on real estate property insurance premiums, which would fund initiatives in communities most impacted by extreme weather.

“It was critical for us to source solutions from communities, collaborating, co-creating and iterating on the process as we went,” says Steve Long, director of policy and partnerships for TNC in Massachusetts. “We built those relationships to develop consensus-driven decisions and learn to work at the pace of trust.”

“Our goal was to take a holistic, conservation and nature-based approach that included the communities directly affected,” adds Gildesgame.

The core team developed a legislative proposal, as well as a series of actionable recommendations that bring the findings of this collaborative effort to a broad audience of policymakers from the state, nonprofits and others working on making the state more adaptable to chnaging environmental conditions.