Creating a Municipal Sustainability Coordinator Position

We coordinated education and outreach to promote creating a position for the first Sustainability Coordinator for the City of Gloucester.

We have had two Sustainabity Coordinators now. They have facilitated commmunity education, like the Resident Climate Action Toolkit to highlight individual climate friendly actions households can take. They have assisted in the development of an annual Energy Savings Fair and an assistance program to help residents access the benefits of the Mass Save program. They have obtained grant funding from various sources including a HEET grant to study the feasibility of geothermal micro-districts in Gloucester. They have partnered with the Clean Energy Commission to work on our Mayor's stated plans to further decarbonize municipal energy in our buildings and our municipal fleet.

Cape Ann, MA

Highlights

  • Creating a buzz around the issue of developing this position. We worked behind the scenes to create awareness and interest from many different individuals and groups.

    Meeting with someone skilled and already employed in the position, who was already actively involved with other people around the state working in these positions, greatly helped us develop our strategy and advocacy plans.

  • Sustainability Coordinator hired.

    The current Mayor reiterated his continued support for the position in his January 2025 State of the City Report.

  • About $50 for printing and colorful paper folders for the info packet.

  • Volunteers

  • For more information email capeannclimatecoalition.org

Steps to implement

  1. A group of five members of the Cape Ann Climate Coalition(CACC), decided to work together to advocate for the creation of a Sustainability Coordinator position within the Gloucester municipal government. Our efforts succeeded and Gloucester now has a fulltime Sustainability position.

  2. We began by educating ourselves. Fortunately, one of us personally knew someone who held a Sustainability position in another Massachusetts community. Meeting with her provided insight into the depth of benefits this position provides and was invaluable to our understanding. We communicated with other sustainability directors for more information regarding their job descriptions, salary ranges and a range of examples of the varied programs they had initiated on the job. In general, we found they openly shared information with us and with each other.

  3. With this background information we developed an info packet to distribute to various local stakeholders. It included:

  4. We informally met with various municipal entities next:

    The Community Development Department’s Planner and Director, some members of the Open Space Committee, the Clean Energy Commission, and the Conservation Commission and a couple of our City Councilors, as  members of the municipal government whose missions might involved climate issues.

    We described the variety of issues CACC was working on, including the Sustainability Coordinator position, asked them to describe the climate concerns they have and asked them to tell us ways that we could help them with their City projects related to climate. We provided them with the info packet we’d made promoting the Sustainability Coordinator position. Later, the packet was provided to all City Councilors and the Mayor at that time.

  5. A social media campaign was launched with postings to our Facebook page, other sites with community participation, and a letter to the editor.

  6. Fortunately, it was an election year for Mayor. By the time the Mayoral debates began for the November election, it appeared that the idea of a Sustainability Coordinator was being very widely discussed. We seeded all the debates with submitted questions and it became a recurrent debate topic. By the third Mayoral debate both candidates running had committed to hiring a Sustainability Coordinator if they were elected.

  7. The incumbent Mayor was defeated and the newly elected Mayor created Gloucester’s first Sustainability Coordinator position. This position has been widely popular and has resulted in many positive climate actions and programs undertaken by the City of Gloucester. Grants obtained have far outpaced the salary of this position.

Making it Great!

  • What worked well

    Five members quietly worked over a 6 month period, more behind the scenes than as a stated Coalition objective.

    Having the Mayoral debate period help focus the candidates on this issue was so helpful.

  • What worked less well

    Despite our advocacy to have the Sustainability Coordinator position created as a separate department head, on par with other department heads, it was placed under the Community Development Department, as a division of that department. We felt this weakened the clout of the individual in this position but are still very pleased to have this position existing in our City and the improvement it's generated.

  • Advice

    Collaborate with other stakeholders.

    Avoid duplicating efforts.

    Find out who is or has worked on similar issues in our community.

    Make your outreach as broad and inclusive as possible.

    Keep your project in the public eye as an important issue with public outreach and if it is a municipal issue keep asking questions and positively highlighting it to showcase public approval helping to ensure the longevity of your efforts.

Additional Resources