EcoWise Communities
Our EcoWise Communities Initiative is designed to support and grow understanding, behavior, and patterns of consumption in communities that are beneficial to our natural environment. People’s direct engagement with the earth and with tangible solutions to environmental problems helps renew their relation to the land and each other. EWI forms partnerships to use schools, community demonstration projects, and ecological restoration sites as the primary means of catalyzing and equipping EcoWise Communities.
Our services aim to generate community-driven strategies to counter the causes and impacts of climate change and natural resource degradation in the southwestern United States. To achieve this goal, EWI operates four interconnected programs:
- Earth Action Education
- 4C: Climate Change Conservation Corps
- Water & Land Health
- Eco Planning & Policy
The EcoWise Horizon
When we look to the EcoWise horizon, we see:
- Ecologically healthy and resilient streams, wetlands and open space areas
- Zero-carbon footprint
- Water conservation and water harvesting in every home and business
- Stewardship ethics practiced and promoted at home, in schools and in government
- Healthy and resilient food systems
- Optimization of social capital and renewed sense of community
Methods
- Developing and maintaining ecological restoration sites as contexts for community building and stewardship capacity building
- Organizing community-driven land stewardship coalitions in rural and suburban communities
- Promoting bio-technical land stewardship solutions
- Connecting people to the land through outdoor education, promotion of local food production, and hands-on land stewardship and restoration activities
- Transforming schools to become model sites for EcoWise behaviors, curriculum and facilities
- Developing and implementing a youth climate corps to advance green collar careers in a restoration and a stewardship economy
- Using schools, residential projects, and demonstration restoration areas as hubs to educate, organize, equip, and motivate community members
- Organizing town hall and neighborhood meetings, for community-scale motivation, needs assessments, asset mapping, and project development
Constituents
EWI serves communities, schools, conservation organizations, and public land management agencies as well as individual residents, landowners, farmers, and ranchers.
EWI Roles and Services
Catalyze
Through educational, inspirational, and experiential (hands-on) activities generate awareness, understanding, interest in, and initiative (action) and demand for green goods, services, curricula and behaviors through town hall meetings, school support services, Tupperware parties, workshops, ecoliteracy walks, quarterly forums and demonstration projects.
Organize
Provide project management leadership to design and launch school and community-based demonstration projects related to outdoor classrooms, water, energy, land management and food security.
Convene stakeholder meetings to facilitate community-based identification of needs, assets, gaps and project priorities.
Equip
Build technical and social capital through on-the-ground projects that serve as hubs for community mobilization, engagement and project replication.
Provide follow-up technical assistance through workshops, trainings and community workdays.
Develop measures of success and certification standards to quantify progress, create a regionally and nationally relevant yardstick, and celebrate accomplishments.
Motivate
Create incentives in support of our goals through research, planning, and policy initiatives for new regulations, tax and other financial incentives programs.
Collaborate with service institutions that can provide incentives programs (e.g. conservation easements, rebates, etc.).
Monitor (and help people monitor) and report accomplishments toward our goals at all levels relevant to motivate people based on their own achievements.
Acknowledge and reward excellence in achievements toward our goals through public recognition and offering awards.
