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Date: 9/12/2023
SOUTH HADLEY — Of the $31.5 million recently announced by the Healey-Driscoll Administration in Climate Resiliency Funding to communities through the state’s Municipal Vulnerability Preparedness Program, South Hadley is being awarded $95,000.
The MVP grant program provides communities with funding and technical assistance to support the climate resilience planning process and implement priority actions to adapt to climate change. In April, Gov. Maura Healey launched MVP Planning 2.0, which serves as the next phase of the flagship program.
It supports communities in updating their climate change resiliency plans in a way that centers environmental justice and other priority populations most impacted by climate change, and putting these plans into action.
South Hadley Director of Planning and Conservation Anne Capra told Reminder Publishing the town will use their $95,000 share from the program for outreach to better understand their needs environmentally, and how potential climate hazards in town could affect those needs.
Capra explained the money will go toward seeking a vendor to assist the town in improving its engagement in community planning within the so-called “climate vulnerable” populations through social-equity centered project facilitation. The selected vendor would work with the town to implement the MVP 2.0 grant.
The MVP 2.0 process will involve bringing together a core team with strong connections to communities in South Hadley that will be most impacted by climate change, and a primary vendor with the skills and experience necessary in the equity-centered project facilitation.
“For example, community leaders, maybe it’s a pastor at a church or a woman who runs the food bank or somebody who works through the Housing Authority. They will help put this system in place so that we can outreach with this people more directly and understand how they’re affected,” Capra explained about the role of the core team.
MVP 2.0 also expands on the climate resilience work the town of South Hadley has done in recent years to identify the municipality’s vulnerabilities to climate change and become more prepared to address them through several infrastructure projects. According to the town, past work focused largely on understanding how extreme weather events will impact infrastructure assets and the physical and ecological environment.
Another intent of the program is to focus on the social impacts of climate change and build needed social resilience to address them. This process will include exploring factors that make people more vulnerable to climate change and improve their resilience to it. This will include closely examining issues such as food security, housing affordability, transportation access and others. For more information about the ongoing climate change preparedness projects in South Hadley, visit https://www.southhadley.org/1278/Climate-Change-Resiliency-Preparedness.
Capra explained the final phase of the grant project is to implement a seed project that would address whatever the issues these populations are facing. A seed project is a project selected by the core team that will advance the community’s resilience priorities, and that can be completed in nine to 10 months. The core team will be tasked with developing a project idea, vetting the idea within the community, develop an implementation plan and implement the seed project.
While these positions have yet to be filled and the money was just awarded to the town at the end of August, Capra said she and the vendor will work together to figure out who in the community are most vulnerable to the potential impacts of climate change.
“I will work with them to figure out who in our community are really most vulnerable to the effects of climate change, whether it be seniors or people who don’t have access to transportation and when there’s a severe weather event, that don’t have the ability to relocate to safer places, or is it one of the many [potential examples],” Capra said. “I really don’t know exactly who that is yet so that’s the first piece of the project is hire a vendor who specializes in community engagement, work with them to figure out who in our community we need to do outreach to put together the core team and work with us to understand what the issues are and how to communicate with the people in need.”
Capra added engagement and feedback with the community would play a big role in establishing the town’s priorities with this grant funding. She added the grant was a “very prescriptive program” and until they began the process of bringing in a vendor and creating a core team, she did not have many details to add outside of the framework of the town’s gameplan.
Capra continued, “The reason I wanted to participate was because I see this outreach and engagement being really important for a lot of community planning projects that we do. There are disadvantaged people in our community — whether it’s because of income, language barriers, transportation access or they have a disability in some manner — that never participate in community planning processes because they’re essentially disenfranchised for one reason or another. And I see this project as being a way for us to help identify who those people are, who these community liaison people are that can help us connect with them and then better understand their needs across a whole spectrum of issues, not just climate vulnerability.”
For more information on the MVP 2.0 Vendor overview and its request for proposals, Capra encourages those interested to visit https://www.southhadley.org/DocumentCenter/View/11680/MVP-20-Vendor-Request-for-Proposals---August-30-2023?bidId=36. Capra added proposals are due Sept. 22 as she will be focused on securing a vendor for the program.