City of Palo Alto – Community Environmental Action Project (CEAP)

Neighborhoods Segment

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Notes from meeting on June 24th

 

CEAP Residents and Neighborhood Segment Meeting

June 24, 2008

Barron Park Green Tour was discussed.  They had a very successful tour of green homes.  Jeb has a GIS system which we can use to map addresses of whatever.  Suggestion was made that we could map “green homes” in Palo Alto and link to profiles of those homes on the wiki.

 

Interesting factoid:  40% of households in Palo Alto are rentals.

Important factoid:  It was noted that 48% of residents participate in Palo Alto Green Power -- 20% of customers, but that includes businesses.  [Comment:  not sure how this could be;  there are many more residents than businesses].

 

CEAP and Palo Alto Neighborhoods Association (PAN)

PAN considering promotion of emergency preparedness at Art and Wine Festival (August 30 -31).  We could use that venue to promote CEAP associated activities.

We need to go to the PAN meetings and make presentation to get permission to go out to their neighborhood association meetings to outreach CEAP and Green At Home.  Next PAN meeting is July 31st. 

 

Ideas

 

Looking at emissions data, it is transportation and energy use.  Transportation may be harder to address, but energy can be addressed.

Can we establish a baseline by survey of households, or getting households to input data into a database (anonomously)

 

It was suggested that CEAP should strengthen existing programs and channels of communication rather than try to create new ones.  Resources should be devoted to promoting Acterra's green at home program, for example, rather than duplicating that effort in any way.  

 

It was noted that there are two separate challenges:  1) How we can deliver messages to  residents and 2) Defining what those messages are. 

 

Spreading the word

1)    Door to door: flyers and/or direct communication

2)    Home tours:  Multi-home or simply one-on-a-block

3)    Block parties (How do we get hooked in?)

4)    Green fairs

5)    City events:  Art festival, May Fete

6)    Farmer’s markets

7)    Neighborhood Association Emails

 

Proposed Segment Goals

 

1)    Promote and facilitate Acterra’s Green at Home program

a.    250 households or more

b.    Do an online survey and sell program to them?

e.    Recruit 30 volunteers to perform audits

 

2)    Reach individual households and get them to

a.    Take simple actions

b.    Sign up for Acterra Green at Home

c.    Sign up for PA Green

d.    Visit the CEAP website

e.    Fill out a survey

 

3)    Establish at least one CEAP member on most Neighborhood associations

 

PROPOSALS For Next Meeting Goals

 

We need to establish the material we will be able to hand out.  Draft Flyer to be authored on Wiki.

Clarify relationship between CEAP and Acterra Green at Home. 

Draft a Survey Questions we would like to ask and define how we would do it.

 

 

 

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Notes from June 4, 2008 Meeting

We brainstormed some possible projects and their measurable outcomes (in bold):

1)  Encourage more residents to become Palo Alto Green customers: How many residents are signed up for PA Green?  (can use percentage of CPAU residential customers or actual number signed up)

2)  Publicize and encourage people to have a Green@Home HouseCall: How many people have had a G@H audit?

3)  Encourage more people to sign up for the CEAP wiki website: How many people are signed up on the CEAP wiki?

4) Organize a door-to-door CFL distribution:  How many light bulbs have we installed?

5)  Encourage residents to sign up for an on-line pledge such as has been done by  Cool Los Altos (see www.CoolLosAltos.org  -- for more info, contact Kacey Fitzpatrick:  kfitz@avalon-enterprises.com): How many people have signed up and are participating?

For all of these measures, we could also set up a Neighborhood Challenge: How many people in each neighborhood are participating?  

This would have certain implications/challenges:

    a) We would need to identify which neighborhood each resident lives in.  Not every resident knows this, but there are maps that identify the neighborhoods – talk with Canopy and/or the Palo Alto Weekly

    b) Larger neighborhoods would be at an advantage, since they have more residents, so using “percent of participation” would be a more fair measure

    c)  It would be hard to estimate the ”percent” of participation, however, without having a specific count of how many residents are in each neighborhood. 

We can use the format that City staffer Wendy Hediger suggested for CEAP projects:

Project idea/name:

Person/group responsible:

Contact info:

Measurement of success:

Start date:

Other info:

--notes taken by Debbie Mytels, 6/4/08