Proportional

Religion Journal – Churches Knocking on Doors, to Talk About the Environment – NYTimes.com

Across the Northwest, where church attendance has long been low but concern for the environment high, some church leaders and parishioners are ringing doorbells to inform neighbors — many of whom have never stepped inside the sanctuary down the street — about ways to conserve energy and lower their utility bills. Some view the new push as a way to revitalize their congregations and reconnect with their nearby community.

The statistics of church membership in the United States are impressive. In the borough of Brooklyn, where I work at the Pratt Center for Community Development, more than 90% of the population claims active congregational membership. Brooklyn, of course, is known as the borough of Churches. But these kinds of numbers are similar across the northeast and surprisingly consistent among the cities of the northeast, where congregational membership tends to be at its highest.

In his book, The Green Collar Economy, Van Jones argues that religious institutions are an essential part of a green revolution because they add a values component to the movement and because they are among the institutions that can connect the disenfranchised to the revolution.

At Pratt Center for Community Development I have been working to help churches with their buildings in a program we are now calling “Sustainable Houses of Worship.” The program has three basic components:

• energy audits – with the help of experts in church energy use reduction, we are studying the most cost effective ways for churches to reduce their energy consumption. Church buildings have very different issues, because of the volume of space and their usage patterns, than commercial and residential buildings.
• building shell assessments – we are conducting shell assessments and connecting religious institutions with roofing and conservation experts to help them secure their shells.
• space usage assessments and business planning – we are helping religious institutions assess the potential for community use of their public spaces and to develop business plans to realize income and promote community fellowship in their buildings.

In a pilot phase, we are working with three churches in Bedford Stuyvesant in Brooklyn. Interestingly, we are finding that the churches we are working with are talking about the need to respond to the changing demographics of their neighborhood. Bedford Stuyvesant, a long time African American community, is experiencing a gentrification process. We are beginning to think that sustainability may be an issue around which the new and old communities can congregate.

Among our goals for this program is the development of congregations and their buildings into what we are calling “beacons of sustainability.” Coupled with our block by block initiative, where we are doing energy retrofits of entire blocks, we are seeking to transform the energy and sustainability profile of whole neighborhoods.Technorati Tags: sustainability, religious institutions, green gosple, neighborhood sustainability

How neighborhoods are transformed!

It is not an uncommon instinct to start an enterprise in bad times and seize on weakened competition, lower overhead costs and perhaps more free time. Nor is it limited to Detroit. But the trend is particularly striking here, in a city that was suffering long before the rest of the nation fell into recession and where hard times, business closings and abandonment became routine generations ago.

via In Detroit, Entrepreneurs See Opportunity in Hard Times – NYTimes.com.