Local Solutions with Global Impact
The Center for Regenerative Community Solutions (now Possible Planet) is a 501(c)(3) NJ-based nonprofit originally devoted to:
- Providing 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,
- Providing local government institutions with assistance to undertake actions and initiatives to reduce and ameliorate present and expected extreme weather and other climate change effects,
- Providing small businesses and non-profit organizations with 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.
CRCS grows out of work that we’ve done for a number of years through the Institute for Sustainable Enterprise at Fairleigh Dickinson University, the Center for Leadership in Sustainability, and through several other nonprofits.
Our team has substantial experience and expertise in community engagement, urban planning, anthropology, organization development, project management, leadership development, finance (especially clean energy finance), and permaculture, as well as the broad topics of sea level rise, coastal ecosystem integrity, and climate change.
Bringing It All Together
What is it that unifies all of our work? Essentially, we see our role as that of bringing resources (both financial and intellectual) to support the implementation of regenerative solutions, solutions that counteract the damage that we as a species are causing to our biosphere’s integrity, and restore its ability to regenerate life.
Underlying this practical action is a holistic and transformational perspective that recognizes the Earth as a unique living system (James Lovelock’s Gaia), of which we are an inextricable part, within an evolving Universe which has given rise to us as conscious and self-aware beings. What is truly remarkable about our existence is our capacity for autonomy within a wholly interlinked and interdependent matrix of relationships with everything that surrounds us. We are free to act, to choose, to be; yet we cannot exist at all outside the physical world, and cannot find meaning outside of the existence and presence of others.
But freedom, as Victor Frankl pointed out, is only one side of the equation. The other side is responsibility, our responsibility to the whole, and to the future. We can choose to act destructively, or indifferently, or negligently in the pursuit of our individual ends; but we all know, at some level, that what is right is what is in the best interests of all, of the Earth as a living system, and of the emerging wisdom and intelligence of which we are capable. So we choose to act constructively, optimistically, and responsibly, not because we have to, but because it’s a privilege to have that opportunity. We are building a world that works. We’re learning to ask not, what do we want from life, but what does life need from us?
Here a scan of our IRS 501(c)(3) designation letter:
Last updated: Thursday, April 20, 2017
