Category Archives: CRCS

Why We’re Asking

JCloudStorerSmAsking for money is one of the more challenging things that every charity has to do. The first question we need to answer, however, is “Why are we asking?” If we don’t have a clear and compelling answer, we’re handicapping ourselves from the start.

So here’s why.

  • It’s to give people the opportunity to contribute to the world they believe in.
  • It’s to give us the ability to keep working on creating a world that works, by providing “regenerative community solutions,” i.e., practical ways of restoring and building communities that last and become self-reinforcing and self-sustaining.
  • Ultimately, it’s to empower the world of generosity, the you-and-me world, rather than the you-or-me world.

In The Soul of Money, Lynne Twist, who has raised more than $150 million in individual contributions, tells the story of her own first monetary contribution:
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NJPACE: A Homegrown Success Story?

We’re committed to a future that has New Jersey PACE as a local success story in the making. Working back from this future, what will this look like, and what will it mean for New Jersey?

Let’s imagine what New Jersey might look like in ten years with PACE. Continue reading

10,000 Rain Gardens

Cities across the US are competing to install 10,000+ rain gardens as part of community-wide campaigns — Seattle is looking for 12,000 near the Puget SoundKansas City, Mo is creating 10,000; and Sustainable Jersey City thinks 11,000 is about the right number for Jersey City.

What’s even more interesting is that these are being seen as community engagement and revitalization projects. Jersey City’s is indeed “crowd-sourced”: Continue reading

Crowdfunding for PACE in New Jersey

JCloudStorerSmThe challenges we face in New Jersey as a result of climate change are significant, and so therefore are the opportunities. The experience of Superstorm Sandy showed us just how ill-prepared we are for the more frequent recurrence of extreme weather; and how important it is that we set an example for taking action to mitigate our own greenhouse gas emissions, as other states are doing around us. And there’s also no doubt about the urgency of it — as you can see from this remarkable video:
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Get a Sneak Preview of Our NJPACE Crowdfunding Campaign

NJPACEOrg-logoDG-MakeaDonationWe’re doing something that seems almost counter-intuitive: we’re asking you, and hundreds of other ordinary people, to donate money to an unusual kind of charity, to help us start what should result in a major economic boost to New Jersey.

This is a way of doing something about climate change that’s significant, personal and concrete. It’s significant because this program will remove millions of tons of carbon pollution each year. It’s personal because we’re cleaning up New Jersey (or, the planet, if you don’t live in NJ). And it’s concrete because this effort will create tons of jobs as energy efficient and renewable energy systems are installed.

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Vote for Our Entry to the Climate Colab Competition

6Bbar_mk_400x400For the past several months, we’ve been working with a hydrogeological engineer and climate scientist in Australia, Dr. Delton Chen. Delton is the lead author on a remarkable proposal to address the problem of climate change via the use of a global alternative currency designed to support the mitigation of climate pollution through an incentive rather than a tax or cap-and-trade system.

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Click to view & support proposal

Delton approached us to sponsor his year-long project to develop a practical global policy response to the failure of the international community to agree on a strategy for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Dubbed G4CM, for “Global Complementary Currencies for Carbon Mitigation,” the core of the proposal has now been put forward in multiple venues, even while some of the technical details are still be worked through with a team of international economists and climate experts. One of these venues is the Climate Colab, a project of the MIT Center for Intelligence, “a crowdsourcing platform where citizens work with experts and each other to create, analyze, and select detailed proposals for what to do about climate change.”

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A Sneak Peek at Our New Crowdfunding Campaign

You can get sneak preview of our crowdfunding campaign at http://bit.ly/1us8SQG. If you’d really like to support us, the best way to do this is to create a personal fundraiser page. You’ll be invited to import your contacts, which will begin to make this go viral… And stay tuned: we’ll be launching the campaign officially next week.

2013 Annual Report

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Our 2013 Annual Report is designed to convey our vision, and provide an account of the progress we have made toward achieving that vision, in developing the NJPACE program in New Jersey. (Click the title of this entry for a link to the fully report.)

End of Year Appeal

We’ve been working towards sustainability in New Jersey for many years.

We just received Federal IRS 501(c)(3) status as a nonprofit charity. Now, we’re asking for your tax deductible contribution.

We’ve worked for 2 years on our current project, New Jersey PACE (NJPACE), which will dramatically lower NJ’s carbon footprint while creating local jobs and saving property owners money. While NJPACE will be self-supporting over the long term, we are committed to raising $350,000 to ensure its success. Read about what NJ and other states are doing at www.newjerseypace.org.
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1st Annual Year-End Appeal

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.
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