The PG&E Corporation Foundation Announces Recipients of $400,000 in Grants to Support Local Climate Change Resilience Planning
December 09 2021 - 1:58PM
Business Wire
Funding focuses on disadvantaged, vulnerable,
and historically underserved communities
The PG&E Corporation Foundation (Foundation) today announced
the four 2021 recipients of the Better Together Resilient
Communities grants, a program to support local initiatives to build
greater climate resilience in Northern and Central California, with
a particular focus on disadvantaged, vulnerable, and historically
underserved communities.
The program awarded $100,000 each to the Tribal EcoRestoration
Alliance, the Blue Lake Rancheria, the Yurok Tribe, and the City of
Richmond, California. The projects are designed to support wildfire
prevention, disaster response preparation, and local emergency
cooling for extreme heat events.
“In California, the communities we are privileged to serve face
a growing threat from a changing climate,” said Carla Peterman,
Executive Vice President of Corporate Affairs and Chief
Sustainability Officer for PG&E Corporation. “For the past five
years, this program has enabled PG&E to partner with our
communities to find new and creative community-driven solutions to
build local climate resilience, with a focus on under-represented
and vulnerable populations.”
The Better Together Resilient Communities grant program, now in
its fifth and final year, has invested $1.7 million in funding from
The PG&E Corporation Foundation and $300,000 from Pacific Gas
and Electric Company (a subsidiary of PG&E Corporation).
Strategies and solutions resulting from the grants are made
publicly available to assist all communities in resilience planning
and work, and to encourage local and regional partnerships.
Project Proposals
The Tribal EcoRestoration Alliance’s project,
“Fire as Medicine,” will build capacity and provide Native American
tribal members with relevant firefighting certifications to
participate in prescribed burns, purchase equipment for
participating in prescribed burns, and share traditional tribal
knowledge and techniques with a broader audience of
practitioners.
“The Tribal EcoRestoration Alliance was founded in 2019 with
seed funding from PG&E’s Better Together Resilient Communities
grant,” said Lindsay Dailey, Program Director of the alliance.
“With PG&E's catalytic support, we have been able to get our
program off of the ground in record time to bring indigenous voices
to the table around land stewardship, wildfire resilience, and
building an eco-culturally literate workforce to meet the
challenges of our times.”
The Blue Lake Rancheria’s project, “Humboldt County COAD
Launch,” will fund 12-months of rapid start-up activities for the
recently formed Humboldt County COAD (Community Organizations
Active in Disaster) network, which is designed to help local
non-governmental organizations prepare and coordinate for disaster
response. The grant will help establish a network of communications
in the region, enable disaster response training, and support
outreach and information events.
“This support from PG&E’s Better Together Giving Program, in
partnership with the Blue Lake Rancheria Tribe, enables the
Humboldt County Community Organizations Active in Disaster to
succeed in this important work for our communities,” said Jason
Ramos, Rancheria’s Tribal Councilman. “It will serve all of
Humboldt’s people, especially those with economic disadvantages,
cultural barriers, access and functional needs, and other
impediments to effective emergency preparedness and
resilience.”
The Yurok Tribe’s project will use prescribed and
cultural burns to collect scientific data on the impacts to soil
quality, wildfire fuel, and invasive species and serve as a
framework for future studies and wildfire mitigation plans. The
project will also support food security by creating a traditional
foods calendar to plan for climate-driven changes in seasonality
for the foods they depend on for nutrition and culture.
"As a way to keep the environment in balance, Yurok people have
implemented prescribed and cultural burns within ancestral
territory since time immemorial,” said Louisa McCovey, Yurok Tribe
Environmental Program Director. “This project will allow us to
quantify some of the benefits of cultural and prescribed burns,
such as preventing catastrophic forest fires, reducing invasive
species, and improving soil quality for traditional food systems.
This grant will also support the creation of a traditional foods
calendar, which will quantify past seasonal shifting of traditional
food harvest times, increasing cultural resiliency to global
climate change by creating a model for future shifts.”
The City of Richmond’s project, “Emergency Cooling
Structures for Extreme Heat Events,” will increase access to
cooling centers by installing cooling misters and canopies in local
parks or community centers. Unsheltered residents will be trained
and hired to staff the cooling centers and do outreach, along with
a broader effort to educate the public in the ways climate change
will directly affect the community and how to reduce that
impact.
“The City of Richmond is dedicated to building community
resilience to climate change,” said Sasha Curl, interim City
Manager. “As global temperatures continue to rise, we must ensure
communities have a way to stay cool.” The 2021 Better Together
Resilient Communities grant will invest “in a project that will
reduce the impacts of extreme heat on our residents while providing
employment and training opportunities.”
About the Program
Grant proposals for the Better Together Resilient Communities
program were evaluated for the extent to which they were designed
to build community resilience and capacity to withstand
climate-related hazards. Priority was given to proposals that
demonstrated past or projected exposure to climate hazards and that
addressed the needs of disadvantaged and/or vulnerable communities.
To be eligible, applicants must be a governmental organization,
educational institution or 501(c)3 nonprofit organization. All
applicants must include a local or tribal government within
PG&E's service area as a partner.
Please check the Better Together Resilient Communities website
for more information.
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