About
What and Why?
Sustainable Grand is a community non-profit working in Grand County, CO since 2022.
The idea for Sustainable Grand was conceived when a few of us from Grand County attended the Mountain Towns Climate Summit in 2022. Every mountain town was represented at this conference and they were all well organized. The other communities had plans for how they’d acquire and implement millions of dollars of state and federal funding for sustainability.
We felt that Grand County needed a similar type of organization. Below we'll do our best to explain why you should care about sustainability in Grand County and why you might want to get involved.
Our near-term focus areas:
Making our buildings more energy efficient; existing and new construction.
Transitioning our community to clean energy.
Increasing the use of electric vehicles and electric outdoor equipment.
Our Fair Share of the Money
Federal and state programs are providing millions of dollars to Colorado communities for energy efficiency, resiliency, renewable energy, EV infrastructure, waste management and more. Historically, Grand County gets very little of this money, because we're not well organized. Our goal is to significantly increase this share of funds coming to our community.
Economy and Lifestyle
If you consider that our region's temperature has increased over the past 100 years, there's a future where our main economic driver [winter tourism] starts to shrink and the supporting industries [restaurants, hotels, retail] struggle to survive. This puts everything at risk; our amenities, the economy, tax base, home values and more.
Resiliency
We need to build a community which is more resilient to climate change and natural disasters. This is possible with better building codes, Firewise planning, redundancy in our electrical grid, micro-grids that can power critical infrastructure and more.
For example, we need places that can act as shelters in a widespread disaster and these places should function if the electric grid has gone down.
Climate change, bio-diversity, water, air quality
A warming region will have so many negative affects on the environment that they're too numerous to list. The mountain pine beetle outbreak, caused by warmer temperatures and lower precipitation, was just one example.
