Signs of Sustainability: Celebrating 20 years of movement building 

Sustainable Finger Lakes recently hosted a party to celebrate our first 20 years of connecting, convening, and catalyzing around how to work and live more sustainably. It was quite a walk down memory lane as we worked on pulling the threads of the celebration together.  Digging through computer folders and file cabinets revealed a number of events and initiatives that even I had totally forgotten about over the years.

Actually, it was 21 years ago this September that Sustainable Tompkins was first conceived.  I was invited by my friend Elan Shapiro to attend a meeting at City Hall with other local activists and community leaders. Ithaca College had won an NSF grant to study sustainability at EcoVillage, and there was interest in getting a local community group going. At the end of the discussion, Elan looked at me and said to the group “wouldn’t Gay be a good person to get us organized for some next steps?”

Uh, what?

Okay, let’s go for it. About a dozen people came together as an Organizing Committee, and I set about designing an engagement process using study circles and conversation salons, and raising the funds – and this is where some incredibly important people got involved. 

It is absolutely true that without Park Foundation, Sustainable Tompkins would not have thrived. They’ve been with us for the entire 21 years, providing us with the essential funds to keep exploring the realms of sustainability and engaging our community. One of our other early supporters was Peter Bardaglio, the brand new provost of Ithaca College, who embraced the challenge of system change for sustainability.  And then stepped in the helpers. Every endeavor has its core group who step up and take on whatever needs to be done, and Marian Brown and Wendy Skinner brought their considerable talents around organizing and outreach.

After the initial summit for the salon and circle participants, it was clear that this thing had legs, but where to start with such a complex undertaking of system change for sustainability?  We knew it would take time to grow a movement and get it connected, and it would be a challenge to keep it going. So, we began with education and engagement of community, government, campus, and business leaders.

We held monthly community meetings in churches and community centers like GIAC and Southside,

master classes on various topics for the more deeply committed, more study circles with interest groups like health care practitioners. We partnered with others like the Dorothy Cotton Institute and Cooperative Extension to create Building Bridges to link local social justice and environmental groups.

We collaborated with local campus partners to put on conferences on a range of topics. Cornell sponsors lined up for our Sustainable Technology Showcase to help our business community become conversant on topics such as clean energy, eco-industrial design, and green buildings. Ithaca College was the sponsor and host of multi-day regional conferences on Health and Sustainability and Finger Lakes Bioneers. Tompkins Cortland Community College was the site of the first Green Collar Career Fair for high school and college students.

Another focus was on greening the economy, and our key partners in government and business were

County Planning Commissioner Ed Marx, Solid Waste Division Director Barb Eckstrom, and Jean McPheeters at Chamber of Commerce.  We organized a green purchasing collaborative with municipalities and campuses, built the Finger Lakes Buy Green website, and offered the Give Your Business a Sustainability Makeover workshop.

Meanwhile, one of the original study circle groups turned into the Green Resource Hub with a mission to expand the regional marketplace for green products and services. Bob Rossi stepped in as a co-founder and we hosted educational workshops for consumers, and later hired Anna Kelles to help us run the SEEN – the Sustainable Enterprise & Entrepreneur Network – that provided monthly networking, green drinks, and sustainability seminars to local businesses.

We were keeping quite busy with our many events, but we knew we needed to also be supporting the movement by helping others act on their good ideas and receive recognition as community leaders. Our Neighborhood MiniGrants Program started in 2008, and we’ve kept it going with over $92,000 in funding for almost 230 projects initiated by local citizens.

It was also in 2008 that our Signs of Sustainability column started in Tompkins Weekly. The column has provided guaranteed coverage of the work of dozens of local sustainability advocates working for change.  Board volunteers Tom Shelley and Cathleen and Eric Banford have put in countless hours lining up authors and meeting those copy deadlines!

Marian Brown once again took on a major part of the workload with our Signs of Sustainability Annual Awards. It started innocently enough as a slideshow at our first year’s potluck gathering, and soon turned into a major annual holiday party for the movement to come together and acknowledge the milestones and accomplishments of the past year.  Once Marian left IC for Wells college, it became the People’s Choice Awards, celebrated at our Earth Day Ithaca events coordinated for many years by Joey Gates.

Throughout the years, a good deal of our programming has been focused on Climate Action.

When the fracking fight started, we organized Energy Fairs and teach-ins, and launched the online Finger Lakes Energy Challenge to help our fellow fracktivists get off fossil fuels themselves. We’ve organized home energy efficiency circles, Communergy seminars, co-created Science Cabarets on climate change with Kitty Gifford, partnered with Get Your Greenback Tompkins and Karim Beers’ team, sponsored a Youth Climate Challenge, helped fight off the Dryden gas pipeline, organized the local People’s Climate March, and put on a major 4-day Climate Smart & Climate Ready conference with Assemblywoman Barbara Lifton.

Back in 2009, we did a feasibility study on creating our own local carbon offset fund to provide gap funding to low-income folks for energy upgrades, and the Finger Lakes Climate Fund launched in 2010.   Our dear friends and energy gurus Ian Shapiro and Jon Harrod provided technical advice, and Ian led the grants review for years.  We’ve been lucky to have local installers like Snug Planet, Halco Energy, and Simply Installs who are willing to work with our low-income awardees and do the necessary paperwork. 

Our Climate Fund work and partnership with HeatSmart Tompkins led us to win a NYSERDA grant during the pandemic, and with the help of our IC interns, Marissa Lansing and Maggie Mowrer, we moved our work online and were so successful getting heat pumps into low-income homes that we won large state and local grants for two pilots to do the same in low-income rentals and mobile homes.

It’s been a busy and fulfilling two decades. Thanks to our donors and volunteers, the community has kept Sustainable Finger Lakes working all of these years. Without you, it would all fall apart!

There’s a lot to celebrate of what we’ve achieved together, but what’s next?  We changed our name to Sustainable Finger Lakes a couple years ago to reflect the reality that we can’t do system change at just the county level. We need to be working at the regional level which is where our foodsheds and watersheds are based, our employment and economic networks interact, and a lot of our political representation happens. 

Like many of you, we’ve participated in fighting off the bad ideas that others want to bring to the Finger Lakes, such as waste incinerators, crypto mining, contaminated sewage sludge and landfills.  But how do we organize to create the good things we think we need for a more sustainable future?  How can our regional movement come together to create a network of networks that find leverage points for making change?  

In 2025, after we wrap up our heat pump pilots, we will be turning our attention back to these larger questions around catalyzing system change. If you are interested in this conversation, please email info@sustainablefingerlakes.org to get updates and to get involved.

Gay Nicholson is the co-founder and president of Sustainable Finger Lakes. The Signs of Sustainability column is organized by Sustainable Finger Lakes.