I love when a simple question leads to something bigger than anyone could have anticipated.
And I am so grateful to be in Dane County, Wisconsin where we have people with vision, people who see a gap and respond “well, we could help with that.”
So it was an absolute delight to celebrate the fifth anniversary of Faiths Connect for Climate Action (FCCA) recently.
Faiths Connect for Climate Action is a network of individuals active in sustainability and climate action through their faith communities. In some cases that means folks are leading internal green teams while others might be pursuing communitywide environmental justice.
I’ve long been intrigued by how faith communities can influence individual lives. A faith community is unique—people voluntarily gather beyond work or neighborhood with others who share their core values. More, these folks celebrate their shared values and they spend time talking about how to live those shared values.
Nobody should be surprised that here in Dane County many faith communities talk about sustainability or that many faith-based facilities in Dane County feature solar and other clean energy technologies.
At the FCCA event I spoke with people focused on getting solar on more facilities as well as people who were thinking beyond their facility walls to communitywide initiatives. Even at an anniversary celebration this group is not content to rest on its laurels. Most of the conversations I had were focused on the future—on ambitious visions for what else these leaders might accomplish.
During the event I took a few minutes to share my own memory from 2020 about how OECC got involved with faith communities. Then County Executive Parisi and I hosted a webinar in the early days of COVID to launch Dane County’s Climate Action Plan and during the discussion one attendee asked if we had thought about how we would work with faith-based communities. The Executive quickly responded “Kathy will work with you to figure that out.” So I convened a couple of meetings with folks where I learned about the challenges of greening a faith facility. In those discussions I witnessed the beginnings of the Wisconsin Creation Care Ambassadors, which eventually morphed into Faiths Connect for Climate Action. It was a classic Dane County moment—people talked about the challenges of getting things started in a faith community given the lack of in-house expertise and that evolved into the idea of faith communities helping each other—a network much like the one that exists today.
FCCA is entirely volunteer. Individuals who have successfully participated in energy efficiency or solar installations at their own faith community provide advice to folks newer on the journey. And everyone shares strategies for engaging members and inspiring more action. Check out this OECC blog post from 2022 for more on the various individual efforts.
If you have heard me speak publicly you may have heard me say that I have the best job in Dane County—I tend to say that a lot because it is true. I get to work with visionary leaders like the folks at FCCA and I get to see how their efforts lead to more rooftop solar, innovative re-use projects and so much more.
Congratulations to FCCA on everything you have achieved and all of the big achievements yet to come. You are part of what makes Dane County so special.
Kathy is the Director of the Dane County’s Office of Energy and Climate Change. In that role she's leading efforts to implement the Climate Action Plan. Prior to coming to Dane County, Kathy led Cool Choices and, prior to that, she led Wisconsin's Focus on Energy program.
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