Sustainable Community in Action

Sustainable Cleveland 2019 was started by Cleveland, OH, Mayor Frank Jackson in August of 2009. At the broadest level, it is a 10-year initiative aimed at engaging Cleveland’s citizens to work together to create a green city on a blue lake. This is accomplished through the creation of working groups addressing a variety of sustainability topics, from extending the growing season to fostering advanced and renewable energy in the area to strengthening neighborhood vitality. Working groups are made up of a combination of community members and professionals working in that field, and are largely self-driven, pursing the projects the group feels are most beneficial. The initiative designates a focus area for each year of the initiative. For example, 2012 is the Year of Local Food. 2013 will be the Year of Advanced and Renewable Energy. Every year the City hosts a Summit to gather key stakeholders together to assess and celebrate progress as well as prepare for coming activities. The Summit serves as a forum for connecting and inspiring attendees so that they might move Cleveland toward sustainability, as well as focusing efforts on the focus areas for the current and upcoming year.

Over the summer I interned with the Cleveland Office of Sustainability working on metrics to measure the impact of the Sustainable Cleveland 2019 initiative. In late September, I returned for the 2012 Summit to see the initiative in action. Reflecting back on my experience, I gained two significant things from my time there: new knowledge about the progress and breakthroughs of sustainability initiatives in Cleveland and across the world, and inspiration from the power of community visioning.

The Summit had an awesome line-up of keynote speakers, each leaving me with a list of things to read and research further. Jeremy Rifkin spoke to us about decentralized energy generation and his Third Industrial Revolution. Janine Benyus talked with us about biomimicry, analogizing the networking and communication going on between participants at the conference to the underground nutrient exchange and ‘communication’ going on between fungal mycelia and plant roots in soil. Kathleen Merrigan, Deputy Secretary of Agriculture at USDA, introduced us to new data sources on local food production. The best part is they recorded all the keynotes and posted them online, so you can watch them at home!

The City of Cleveland produced this primer and this video to highlight energy advances made in the region. Check it out; I’m pretty impressed.

But possibly the more meaningful part of this experience for me was watching 400-500 participants imagine a sustainable future for their community around the areas of local food and advanced and renewable energy (remember the focus topics for the year). Everyone brought their unique ideas and experience to the table, and by working collaboratively for a day and a half, at the end of the Summit there were several new projects that had been designed, working groups that had been formed, and commitments that had been made to furthering the cause of sustainability in Cleveland. Although time will tell how many people follow through and turn the talk into something concrete, being a part of the creation stage was pretty inspiring.