Croton100’s Growing Impact is Seeded in CURE100
By: Patty L. Buchanan
Croton100 continues to grow in impact! In addition to galvanizing our community through education and advocacy around carbon cutting campaigns, Croton100’s model to pair community action with data about carbon emissions by zip code is bringing together communities who share our vision. From its inception, Croton100 envisioned the creation of a coalition of communities that would share use of Croton100’s groundbreaking Carbon Tracker. Our vision is beginning to come to life by the formation of charter chapters of CURE100, the coalition that seeks to cure our atmosphere of perilous greenhouse gases. CURE100 is an acronym for Communities United to Reduce Emissions 100%.
We now have a CURE100 Master Plan, which is an open invitation to like-minded communities throughout the United States to become a chapter of CURE100. Chapters get many benefits including know-how, resources and a free license to use our Carbon Tracker. In return, CURE100 chapters must adopt the mission and pledge of CURE100 (in turn modeled after Croton100) and pay nominal dues to CURE100. Chapters manage their own finances and run their campaigns in an autonomous fashion, while maximizing sharing of resources and know-how with other chapters and the CURE100 “mother ship.”
Both the Carbon Tracker and the CURE100 model use United States zip codes as the foundational organizational structure. Zip codes were adopted as the organizational focus for three primary reasons: (1) vast amounts of GHG emissions data can be accessed by zip codes; (2) pairing emissions data alongside demographic data, which is also accessible by zip code, provides actionable insights about emissions with household and individual responsibilities to reduce emissions; and (3) community power is built around zip codes, which are an effective way to organize actions, including core strategies like neighbors influencing neighbors, and public/private partnerships. The CURE100 model can also work in communities that have partial zip codes within their municipal boundaries and where there may be more than one zip code in their community, by pro rating zip code data with population distribution.
The first community to adopt Croton100’s model and license the Carbon Tracker was our neighbor, Yorktown100. We have also licensed our Carbon Tracker to Bedford 2020. Here’s even more exciting news about our growth: several regional Rivertowns have expressed interest in CURE100, and we have even learned of possible interest in California.
In this nascent growth period, we have been enticing communities with the power of our Carbon Tracker by providing a free analysis of their GHG inventory. This read-out can be generated by our small, volunteer Carbon Tracker Administrative Team; this feature is not yet available to users. This feature is remarkably impactful because communities could spend tens of thousands of dollars and a year or more of time engaged in extensive study to obtain actionable insights about their GHG inventories. Because the World’s Leading Scientists warn us that to avoid irreversible perilous global warming, we must make rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society, the rapid analysis by the Carbon Tracker, coupled with the organizational structure for immediate action in the CURE100 Master Plan, Croton100 can help to launch rapid, far-reaching, unprecedented change in all 41,702 zip codes in the United States!
How can you help grow this critical impact? Come to our Community meetings and stay tuned to progress in the formation of CURE100. Share information about Croton100, CURE100 and the Carbon Tracker with your friends, neighbors, relatives, policy makers, and elected officials. Feel free to use this blog post as an introductory resource. And please, donate to Croton100 to help fund our vision.
