11-1SG South West Cheshire for Clean Air
Grant Round:
2011 February
Grant Program:
Small Grants
Grant Type:
Other Grants
Grant amount requested:
1,500.00
Grant amount awarded:
$1,500.00
Attachments
Please provide a brief description of the project for which you seek funding.
To organize on behalf of residents in Winchester, to prevent the building of a woodburning biomass plant within 2 miles of our elementary school, learning center and downtown. We will reach out to members of the community through postcard mailings and go door to door with flyers to inform the public about the potential danger of breathing particulate matter in large quantities from the plant that is proposed. We feel that this plant would impact not only our town and village but also the towns nearby. We wish therefore to continue to visit neighboring towns and produce documents detailing the impact on the surrounding communities as well as the main impacted community. In a first round of contact we have spoken to four town's conservation boards. We will follow-up with other boards, and in addition do mailings, print flyers, hold house meetings and go door to door to create local citizen contact and engagement.
We face corporate interests in locating here. Our town and village is a low-income town and we have had many struggles with dirty polluting businesses attempting to come here because of our median income. We as a town have a strong sense of pride and do not want to see our town become a wasteland and depository for numerous polluters. Twenty years ago, our town was targeted for a place to burn sludge, this was defeated after much hard work, and now we are being targeted again, in this case for another different burning business that would potentially produce a huge amount of particulate matter in the valley that our town sits in.
Our group got involved when informed by someone on our conservation commission that a business calling itself green was not in fact green and instead was potentially going to increase the levels of particulate matter in our community to hundreds of pounds/year. We started holding house meetings and doing research on the proposed plant. When we discovered that the plant was inefficient and would pollute our environment we started informing citizens of the impact on the community. Many people did not even know about the proposed plant.
Our timeline is to work this next year informing more of the public about this polluting business that wants to locate here. Our steps for project completion will be to create a flyer and start door-to-door contact in the spring. We will continue to have more house meetings as we build a base of activists and citizens. We will create a full campaign to inform the population and stop this plant.
Primary Issue Area:
Environmental Health
Please break-down/categorize the program expenses:
| Proposed Item | Estimated $ Amount | Would grant funds be used for this item? |
|---|---|---|
| post card mailings | $950.00 | Yes |
| printing leaflets, insert in local newspaper | $450.00 | Yes |
| ad, technical support, fundraising | $100.00 | Yes |
Whom does your group need to make this project happen?
Please explain how your group will engage members from your community in this project.
Our community work will engage local citizens to be empowered to choose to have a clean air environment by standing strong for their rights to oppose an inefficient woodburning biomass incinerator in their valley. We will contact citizens to inform them of the dangers of the proposed plant to their familys health and hold house meetings to discuss strategy to oppose the plant. We will also go door to door with our flyers and talk to citizens at our local recycling /transfer station and in front of the post office, to get the word out. When the town has public hearings we will ask citizens to attend, and keep them informed about important meetings, dates and hearings. We would also get a letter to the editor campaign going and put an ad in the local newspaper with health information for particulate pollution.
In addition we will team up with other state communities that are dealing with the same issue, and work as a larger community to contact the State and Federal Government to request they require more efficiency standards in their grant funding process for new energy. We will continue to stay connected as a community by establishing a positive network of activists and citizens to persevere with a vision for a better healthier Winchester.
We will promote active participation by encouraging citizens to run for local office where their voices can make a difference. We will also contact town community groups and ask members to spread the word of our environmental action. We will remind the community of our local environmental resources and how much it will mean to us all if we keep them pristine and show on the website our river and forests, and contrast that with information on how we will be impacted by the proposed plant, both healthwise and environmentally.
If your group receives a NEGEF Grow grant, how do you plan to pay for remaining expenses?
| $ Amount | Source |
|---|---|
| $1,500.00 | NEGF Grant |
Please list these materials or services
| $ Amount | Item |
|---|---|
| $500.00 | donated graphic design |
| $400.00 | donated web research and design |
| $600.00 | donated volunteer hours |
Please describe what changes will occur in your community and its environment when your group's project is successful.
WE hope to preserve the agricultural/rural character of the town envisaged in the town's master plan, and in particular hope to engage the community to see that a healthy environment is an essential part of the future of a healthy and successful town. Many individuals support this idea but are not currently organized as a community to promote this concept to reality. Changes of attitude to believe that this town can become better, after its mill town past, and move forward into this next century with a positive vision coupled with a growth of small businesses that can promote or benefit from the health of the river and forests instead of promoting one or two large industrial businesses is what is possible if our group project is successful. We would measure these changes in a populace that is unafraid to stand up at town meetings and speak out freely with differing opinions than the town government, and also we would measure these changes as occurring when those newly engaged citizens run for town offices, to begin to create and maintain the self enabled population to act on its own needs for a healthy environment. The long-range impact of our work will be to keep citizens engaged and positive about the impact they can have if they work together on a common cause.
Please list how many people in your community your group expects to actively engage in this project.
2 900
What relevant skills does the group need (but does not currently have access to) to help move the initiative forward?
More expertise on web design skills would be helpful, more fundraising experience, continuing outreach skills sharpened.
What relevant skills do current members of the group have to help move the initiative forward?
Four group leaders have skills canvassing and phone banking, as well as having team building skills within this particular community. We have worked with community members in the past and created volunteer teams that had assigned tasks that were followed effectively. Other members of that same team also practiced group leading skills and hosted house meetings and participated in community outreach and action. We have a group member that helped create a website for a cause and donated his time and expertise, researching the subject and creating an informative site that we referenced on our flyer. We also have skilled graphics people, writers and strategists.