Now that we have our 501c3 designation, we’re asking for your financial support. We have just a couple of days for you to make a tax-free contribution this year, so we’d like to suggest that you do so as a way of expressing your faith, your commitment, and your support of our mission.
We’re not just about a good idea whose time has come. We’re about making it a reality here in New Jersey, and in doing so transform our built environment. And this is the ideal place to do it — an older northeastern state, with many declining cities and older suburbs, and enormous opportunities for revitalization. So we’ve put more an enormous effort over the past year into developing a state-wide NJPACE program, and bringing PACE to a number of specific New Jersey communities in 2014.
But we can’t do this alone. We created the Center for Regenerative Community Solutions to be the nonprofit umbrella for the education, the development of tools and alliances, and the administration of this program, so that the industry, the property owners, the lenders, and the municipalities could take advantage of the benefits that NJPACE offers them. Our goal is to raise $350,000 in order to create this opportunity for our state, as other groups are doing elsewhere in the country.
We’d like you to be amongst the first to contribute, at whatever level you’re comfortable doing so — from $5 to $5,000 or more, from a one-time gift to a regular monthly contribution, from an anonymous donation to one that attracts very highly publicized acknowledgement.
Ultimately, our expectation is that the program will become fully self-supporting, based on administration fees incorporated into each project. But the mission will continue beyond this to offer a wide range of regenerative solutions for communities. Our goals are:
- To provide local communities with educational services on the effects of climate change and other related issues that can affect their long term ability to regenerate their ecological and economic systems,
- To provide local government institutions with assistance to undertake actions and initiatives to reduce and ameliorate present and expected extreme weather and other climate change effects, and
- To help small businesses and nonprofit organizations obtain funding to undertake actions and initiatives to reduce and ameliorate present and expected climate change effects in low and moderate-income communities, including communities impacted by Hurricane Sandy.
New Jersey PACE is clearly one way of helping commercial, industrial, multi-family, and nonprofit buildings such as hospitals and universities obtain the funding they need to undertake “deep retrofits,” and to install new clean energy generation.
At the same time, it is a tool for local governments to help the private sector become more resilient and more self-reliant — at no cost to taxpayers.
Finally, it’s also a vehicle for educating communities and individuals about the potential energy and economic impacts of climate change.
There are a number of specific ways you can help us. You can donate money, which will go to establishing the program, documenting and publicizing it, and broadening it to include Main Street and beyond, as well as major developers and property owners. You can help us with contacting your municipality, your local Green Team, and your local banks, energy contractors, and property owners. You can join the Alliance for NJPACE, and help us get the word out to everyone who can benefit from this program. Or you can tailor your own contribution to your specific skills, knowledge, and interests.
