Green For All and the Center on Wisconsin Strategy (COWS) have just released A Short Guide to Setting Up a City-Scale Retrofit Program (pdf, 308 KB), a guide to designing and implementing energy efficiency retrofitting programs on a citywide scale. The organizations aim to make these retrofits available to more households and to provide good, entry-level jobs with career tracks that are accessible to low-income communities and communities of color.
While current retrofitting programs have overwhelming economic and environmental benefits, many are unavailable to low-income individuals and many current retrofitting programs only create low-wage, short-term jobs.
The guide is a tool for local organizations, business leaders, entrepreneurs, elected officials and others to promote energy efficiency in their communities while providing pathways into sustainable careers in construction and green building. It outlines all of the important aspects of such a program, including policies, labor standards, community coalitions and long-term funding options.
More about the guide on Green For All’s website.
Stacey Meinzen has a broad range of experience in climate change policy. From her work with ICLEI doing a municipal greenhouse gas inventory to her news coverage of climate change for Flex Your Power's e-Newswire, to her research on climate change policy for Green For All, she has absorbed a range of views and interests about the best way to deal with this complex issue. Her primary interest is in local solutions that can be executed with sound policy to support them. She founded ClimateActionPlans.com to highlight key green projects and the programs and policies that allow them to happen.