Green Cities California: Sharing Best Practices Through GreenCitiesCalifornia.org
Bringing innovative people, ideas and technology together to effect change for our communities is one of the hallmarks of Josh Becker, Democratic candidate for State Assembly (21st District).
Take the issue of sharing best practices so cities can develop sustainable public policies. Becker saw the need to bring cities together to swap successful ideas and promptly created GreenCitiesCalifornia.org.
“I was at a bunch of different conferences — clean energy conferences, business conferences and policy conferences,” Becker says. “I kept hearing about the need for best-practice sharing to speed along the development of sustainable public policy.” Yet, there was little action in the area.
So Becker quickly got to work researching current efforts. He was put in touch with California Green Cities, a group of 10 local governments taking action to accelerate the implementation of groundbreaking environmental policies.
The group had powerful ideas, but no web site or technological resources to easily share these ideas among themselves and with other cities.
“Green Cities was formed to take collaborative action to speed sustainability. But what they didn’t have was experience developing compelling web content or the financial resources to build a site on their own,” Becker says.
Through Full Circle Fund, an engaged philanthropy organization that he founded, Becker pulled together various resources and helped the group build GreenCitiesCalifornia.org in six short months.
Becker led the process, bringing in Full Circle Fund and the 11th Hour Project to put together $60,000, hire a web designer at reduced cost and use their technology background to build a compelling site that launched in October 2009.
GreenCitiesCalifornia.org hosts a virtual toolkit that provides easy accessibility to the policy documents, performance measures and media outreach tools that cities need.
With the site, cities are able to easily share ideas, such as how to implement wind power, green building policy, LED street lighting, water conservation and environmentally preferable procurement policies.
“A city can look at the site and see all the related documents needed to adopt and implement over 50 best practices,” Becker says. “Green City members have found it useful, and other cities across the country are learning from California’s example. It’s another example of how we can bring together governments across the state to lead policy change.”
