Join guest speaker Gay Nicholson, founder of the Finger Lakes Climate Fund, as she discusses how she started the fund, how it works, as well as the mini-grants they provide to low and moderate-income households to enable renewable energy projects in their region. This presentation is a special presentation from Funding Futures: Together We Decide.
Funding Futures: Together We Decide is a new training and grant program from Partners for Climate Action. Six Funding Futures Fellows, each from a different town, will learn how to work with their communities to set ecological goals and find funding for them. During the one-year process, our cohort participates in a pilot training and support program to organize community conversations in their towns around environmental priorities.
Bio:
Since 2004, Gay Nicholson has led Sustainable Finger Lakes (formerly “Sustainable Tompkins”) in designing and implementing an integrated program to advance the creation of a more sustainable regional community. Gay emphasizes a systems approach to working with partners to build the infrastructure and social capacity for more sustainable ways of living and working. Gay participates in a number of local partnerships related to energy and climate, equity as an economic driver, and sustainable agriculture.
Gay left a career in sustainable agriculture to work in environmental advocacy and education with Cornell’s Program on Ethics and Public Life, and as executive director of the Finger Lakes Land Trust before leading the creation of Sustainable Tompkins. She has been an active volunteer in numerous community and environmental organizations, providing leadership from the local to the national level.