Scaling Climate Action: Green Pathways Symposium Highlights
On June 25, 2025 Green Community Catalysts attended TDI MassDevelopment’s Green Pathways Symposium, hosted in the innovative Greentown Labs space in Somerville, MA. The event featured a thoughtful keynote speech from Northeastern professor Joan Fitzgerald, and as well as panels of community leaders, government officials, and industry partners sharing insights about how communities can best accelerate climate action and bolster equitable workforce development.
Here are five major insights and lessons that we’re taking away from this event:
We must empower Community Based Organizations (CBOs) to be critical municipal partners, not just stakeholders, in green infrastructure and climate adaptation projects. As a panelist described, CBOs often have better ‘touchpoints’ in the community that allow them to bring a level of agility and creativity that larger entities like municipalities or state governments cannot. Green Community Catalysts’ free courses and paid incubator program features various examples and case studies of successful municipal-CBO partnerships, highlighting ways that CBOs can leverage their connections in the community to help cities transition climate action efforts from “random acts of greenness” to sustained and intentional action.
In order to effectively advance climate action in their communities, CBOs must have sufficient funding. CBOs can best achieve funding goals not by competing with other CBOs, but by partnering and collaborating with them. It can be highly advantageous for CBOs to team up to apply for grants or other sources of funding together, because funders, especially large grantors, evaluate CBOs’ capacities to ensure that they will put the money to good use. Partnering with another CBO effectively leverages relevant synergies to increase your capacity, which can lead to greater success in project and program implementation. GCC’s training module on funding highlights various ways to partner with other local CBOs to increase chances of receiving larger grants.
Unfortunately, communities that are most in need of the work that a CBO can do — communities that would benefit most from a healthier environment, decarbonization, or a lowered energy burden, for example — have the most funding gaps. Cities and states have an important role in identifying and filling those gaps. Again, a section of GCC’s training module on funding is devoted to highlighting state funding channels that are focused on gateway cities and/or environmental justice communities.
CBOs must not only consult community members for their input into project planning and proposals, but also involve them meaningfully in the actual implementation of the project. As one panelist put it, it’s not enough to just bring someone to the table – you also have to leave them there. Community-based knowledge is key and cannot be replaced by someone from outside the community. In our training module on community engagement, we explore the ‘ambassador’ concept: Ambassadors are community members that live in certain neighborhoods or share identities with people that the CBO is hoping to reach, and they act as a representative of or share information on behalf of the CBO. This is grounded in the fact that people are more likely to act and be receptive to information presented by someone who shares similar identities, backgrounds, and beliefs as them. It is also especially important that historically marginalized communities are empowered to be involved in the climate solutions taking place in their neighborhoods.
Finally, climate change, inequitable workforce development, and economic inequality are not isolated or mutually exclusive issues. Advancing climate justice is as much about advancing economic or racial justice. GCC’s training module on audience walks through an exercise that helps CBO leaders understand the social and economic conditions of various target audience groups, and to develop programs that meet people where they are at. CBOs should also look to create equitable workforce development opportunities in their ranks, employing people from various target audiences in their green initiatives.
Beyond just being an informative event, the Green Pathways Symposium was also an especially powerful way to connect people with similar passions. It was galvanizing to see that there are so many people who care as deeply as we do about addressing the climate crisis and facilitating equitable development, and who are taking on various projects at all sorts of organizations to transition this vision of a just and climate-resilient future into a reality.
Did you attend the symposium? Leave a comment below with your thoughts on what stuck out most to you.
Or, if the event motivated you to participate in the climate movement, check out our blog post on ways you can get involved with your local climate CBO.