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Planning for Collective Climate Goals for San Mateo County

Thursday, September 23, 2021, 3:30 PM, Zoom Recording & Live Document

MEETING RECAP

At the last Environment & Sustainability meeting, Thrive Alliance brought together the San Mateo County community to bring together their priorities on climate change and climate justice. This was a fantastic opportunity to hear from local community members, different environmental justice organizations, and others involved in this space.

We were joined by Matt Biggar, PhD., founder of Connected to Place, who facilitated the event and created a focus around systems, place-based systems, and a systems change approach to address the issue of climate change and justice.

Before the event, we sent out a one question survey asking the community, “If stakeholders were to work together across San Mateo County to address climate change and climate justice, where should we focus our efforts?” With 50 submissions and multiple components per answer, Matt created a document with 10 different systems: transportation, housing, building energy, work (employers/industry/business), food, consumer goods, adaptation (reducing harm from climate change), nature, water, and education. Each different system had several components that were filled with the survey responses.

As there were several different organizations represented and individuals at this meeting, the audience was divided into several breakout rooms. The first breakout session was a space for introductions, what the organization/individual does, and listing out initiatives from organizations that address and align with different components of each system. It was amazing to see the document jump from 4 to 15 pages as the current initiatives section filled up with at least one, if not several, initiatives and programs each of the organizations addresses.

In the second breakout session, the audience was randomly divided into eight different rooms, each focused on 1-2 priorities. Each group discussed their system, its components, and how these the components can work as leverage points to pursue climate justice, mitigation, and resilience. Several of these discussions had overlapping points as other breakout rooms as well as great conversations on how to best advance equity issues surrounding the various systems.

The live document is still open for those who would still like to input more ideas, especially for those who may have been unable to come to this meeting. We would love to get more input from organizations that may not have had enough time to input their expertise while in their breakout sessions as well as an opportunity for others to know what different organizations do, so please feel free to keep adding on!

Join Thrive for the next Environment & Sustainability event on Thursday, October 28 to continue this discussion. In this meeting, we hope to move forward from identifying the issues impacting climate change and justice (the “what”) to the next phase in looking at methods that may address the issues (the “how”).