2016-17 Community Grant Awardees

NYS Restaurant Association Educational Foundation: The Restaurant Food Waste Project aims to help state restaurants become more aware and committed to the critical issue of managing food waste. This project will promote the importance and strategies of food waste management while at the same time supporting increased restaurant profitability.

Syracuse University: Plastic-Free Waterways through Art seeks to use visual arts to engage and empower statewide communities to decrease single-use plastic consumption by inspiring consumers to change their habits and adopt practices that reduce their utilization.

Hudson River Sloop Clearwater: Microplastics Pollution Prevention will educate teachers and children on how extensive microplastics pollution has become in the Hudson River, and will focus on the actions that people can take to reduce them.

ENY Farms!/United Community Centers: East NY Compost Project is designed to expand its community composting work by increasing its capacity to manage food scraps the organization collects. It also will enable the project to reliably supply gardens with locally produced composting material.

Central New York Regional Planning and Development Board: Classroom Energy Challenge/KiloWatch seeks to teach school teachers and administrators as well as students and their families about conservation and renewable energy by promoting energy sustainability through education, emissions monitoring and energy-use reduction inside area homes and throughout the community.

Riverkeeper: Empowering Communities to Prevent Stormwater Pollution aims to reduce pollution in the Gowanus Canal and Newtown Creek by empowering community residents and connecting them to their waterways. A community toolkit will be produced that will enable this project to be easily replicated in other neighborhoods around New York City.

The Wild Center: The Adirondack Youth Climate Program will increase pollution-prevention awareness and decision-making skills in high school students throughout the Greater Adirondack region, while fostering community-based climate action projects across North County school districts.

Buffalo Niagara Riverkeeper: Preventing Pollution through Volunteer Ambassadors will develop a program to train dedicated volunteers to represent the organization within the Niagara River Watershed, while increasing the capacity to raise awareness of water pollution issues and how to reduce them.

Clarkson University: Watershed Education through STEM Enrichment is designed to engage and inform students and teachers about local tributary health and to empower the community to prevent pollution in the region.

Center for Creative Land Recycling: Integrating Pollution Prevention Measures into Brownfield Remediation and Redevelopment seeks to target 120 communities that comprise New York state’s Brownfield Opportunity Areas by offering workshops, peer learning and educational materials on environmental and pollution-prevention practices. These practices will create healthier, more resilient and adaptive communities.

Adirondack North County Association: Organics Recycling Community Outreach Plan-North Elba Biodigester will support the comprehensive educational programming required to increase awareness, understanding and the training necessary to fully implement a source separated organics diversion program for the region, therefore reducing greenhouse gas emissions and landfill waste generation.

New York Product Stewardship Council’s NY Textiles Summit: Innovations in Manufacturing Waste Reduction and Reuse will raise public awareness about the environmental impacts of textiles as well as the work of the Re-Clothe NY Coalition—a public-private initiative established to increase the reuse and recycling of textiles statewide.