Welcome

to the Tompkins County Climate Protection Initiative

309 North Aurora Street | Ithaca, NY 14850 | info@tccpi.org

Web Platform Goes Live

Sustainable Tompkins went live in November 2019 with our new Sustainable Finger Lakes web platform with its map of over 700 sustainability-minded organizations. The platform will be a shared resource for activists, innovators, and entrepreneurs to find each other, discover resources in nearby communities, and organize more effectively around issues of community development.

Sustainable Finger Lakes will be a place to share your news and upcoming events, send out calls for action on diverse issues, and celebrate each other’s contributions to a better future. You can also post your events on our shared calendar so that it will be easier to coordinate the timing of local events.



Our motivation for developing Sustainable Finger Lakes is simple. Across our region, citizen leaders are helping their communities discover and adopt more sustainable patterns of living and working. Thanks to the vision of these businesses and organizations, the Finger Lakes region has an emerging landscape of new social and economic structures based on ecological stewardship, justice, and shared responsibility for our future. It’s been wonderful to witness how many people have engaged around protecting our health, land-based economies, and democratic rights –- creating a regional sustainability movement that is large, diverse, and constantly growing.

We all know that it isn’t enough to just oppose the harm and wrongdoing of the current system. We have to be actively building a new system based on principles of sustainable design and participatory democracy. This work needs to take place at the local and regional levels simultaneously because of the interconnectedness of our natural systems and economies.

We believe that we need more of a shared identity as a regional sustainability movement, working together to protect the very special landscapes of the Finger Lakes. By coming together across 15 counties, from the Pennsylvania border to the Great Lakes, and from the Conesus to the Otisco Lake watersheds, we can claim a significant number of citizens, business owners, and voters who are united in a vision of a sustainable future for our region.

Many communities in our region, however, have very little social infrastructure in place to support those interested in sustainable living. When we started Sustainable Tompkins in 2004, we often heard participants say that they had thought they were nearly alone in their values and beliefs, and that it was a great relief to feel part of a larger and stronger cultural force. As our Tompkins County movement has grown, we see more and more people finding the inspiration and the social courage to advocate for change, shift their lifestyles, or start a new business with a focus on the triple bottom line of people, planet, and profit.

We hope you will want to get involved and support this shared platform for building our movement!

- Gay Nicholson, Sustainable Tompkins

Sustainable Finger Lakes Platform