CCAB's commitment to deeply reducing Brookline's carbon dioxide emissions depends upon broad public engagement across our community. Over the past year of EcoTeam outreach, our work has shown the value of working through well established community structures, such as faith congregations, neighborhood associations, town agencies, and schools. Among these, congregations show the greatest promise to greatly expand the numbers we can reach. We are requesting funding for $2,260 to promote, facilitate, mentor, and track EcoTeam development throughout a network of faith-based organizations who will conduct EcoTeams for their membership under our guidance. CCAB has been a pioneer among the network of Cool Mass communities in using the EcoTeam approach. It has set a target to establish at least 12 EcoTeams in 2011 among religious organizations and to expand that rate each of the subsequent three years. CCAB’s proposed work with Brookline’s religious organizations will fit well in the context of our already having experience creating and supporting EcoTeams in Brookline, where groups of households meet together to identify and support each other in pursuing opportunities to reduce their carbon footprints. EcoTeams have proven to be excellent opportunities to work with residents to build community connections while learning from one another in small groups how to reduce home energy use and carbon footprints. Expansion to religious organizations in the town would be a natural next step in building on CCAB’s ongoing participation in Cool Mass, a partnership between Massachusetts Climate Action Network and a number of Massachusetts communities, using the Low Carbon Diet workbook and approach (from the Empowerment Institute, Woodstock, NY) to educate and inspire participants to reduce household greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. This approach has been field-tested and has a proven track record for educating and inspiring participants. Our experience and correspondence with other Cool Mass community leaders indicates that the congregational communities have the most traction and staying power for establishing and spreading EcoTeams. We believe that the religious sector will be particularly supportive of this effort because of: * The close compatibility of the goal of reducing energy usage and carbon footprints with the principle of stewardship of the earth within most religious communities; and * The regular weekly intervals when members of religious organizations meet and develop closer relations among families that could be a good foundation for EcoTeam work. We have this year contacted clergy leaders from 13 congregations in Brookline and have seen commitments lead to action in a few congregations. We now seek to formalize our support mechanisms and strengthen the outreach among faith community groups. We will encourage our faith-based partners to identify participants who can become team leaders, recruit new members, and initiate new EcoTeams as part of their efforts. We will support partners by providing vision, coaching, and materials that will enable them to launch and sustain successful EcoTeams and to foster expansion of the program across Brookline. We will conduct training sessions, provide materials, and provide on-going mentoring to the partner organizations and the individual teams they conduct. CCAB will work with the religious organizations to build a sense of community, and use them to scale up the program. We will create Learning Networks to share experiences and successes among congregations and then to other non-faith community groups that make up the fabric of our community. Just as EcoTeams are small Learning Networks among neighbors or co-congregants, a larger scale network is needed to share learning about the process and to help aggregate and leverage the results of the campaign. By working closely with religious organizations and engaging them as partners, we will have an accelerated path to conducting successful EcoTeams. At the same time, we recognize that faith congregations are one approach among many. We continue to work with other sectors (business organizationss, school green teams, government agencies such as the Brookline Health Department and Planning Department, etc.) to move forward on our goals.