Overall Rating Gold - expired
Overall Score 73.04
Liaison Troy Goodnough
Submission Date March 30, 2018
Executive Letter Download

STARS v2.1

University of Minnesota, Morris
IN-25: Innovation B

Status Score Responsible Party
Complete 1.00 / 1.00 Troy Goodnough
Sustainability Director
Office of Sustainability
"---" indicates that no data was submitted for this field

Name or title of the innovative policy, practice, program, or outcome:
Growing the Rural Climate Dialogues Initiative in Morris

A brief description of the innovative policy, practice, program, or outcome that outlines how credit criteria are met and any positive measurable outcomes associated with the innovation:

The Morris campus is partnering with the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy and Jefferson Center to improve community planning for clean energy implementation in Stevens County. During the academic year 2017-2018 our partnership focused on implementing two large community meetings. The first meeting was called Our Energy Future: Stevens County. The meeting focused on increasing community energy literacy. Several community presenters provided information about the local energy
planning environment, including the energy resource planning manager from the local utility. The meeting also focused on brainstorming clean energy projects that the community wanted to see implemented. The second meeting was called: Our Energy Future: Ideas to Action. Again, we brought in different speakers to share new information about clean energy projects happening in the community.
And, we focused on developing a set of actions we could take to increase the likelihood of project implementation in Morris and Stevens County.
Results:
Our public engagement project was very successful. We were able to get 70 community members together to learn, discuss, brainstorm and develop ideas to increase clean energy implementation in the Morris community. We were able to bring new community leaders into the conversation that had not been present before. And, we helped to model an approach for engaging in rural communities around clean energy implementation.


Which of the following impact areas does the innovation most closely relate to? (select up to three):
Public Engagement

A letter of affirmation from an individual with relevant expertise or a press release or publication featuring the innovation :
The website URL where information about the programs or initiatives is available:
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Additional documentation to support the submission:
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Data source(s) and notes about the submission:

Here is an example of a blog post by a UMM student about this work.

https://ruraldialogues.org/2018/01/23/helping-citizens-become-community-climate-leaders/


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