Who Knew? New Jersey, a Garden State of Sustainability

New Jersey is pop culture’s current obsession, but it is also at the center of a very different kind of cultural movement. The Garden State is leading the nation’s sustainability movement as the first state to successfully adopt a comprehensive sustainability program for local communities.

Local citizens of New Jersey are working together through Sustainable Jersey to certify that their town wants to go green, control costs, save money, and sustain its quality of life. They get the certification by undertaking activities like organizing evenings when people can network to find or fill green jobs, forming energy saving task forces, and promoting safer roads for pedestrians and cyclists.

Sari from Cherry Hill takes a turn riding the bike that waters the plants
in the greenhouse with encouragement from one of the junior gardeners.

Sustainable Jersey has surpassed all expectations by certifying towns that are home to more than 65 percent of New Jersey’s population so far, making it the most successful statewide municipal sustainability certification program in the country. Co-founder Donna Drewes said she is not surprised because most communities actually have a strong desire to become more sustainable, but often local governments don’t have the capacity to put specific initiatives in place, and individuals are overwhelmed by the challenge of what to do first.

“Our program has a menu of specific actions that communities choose to focus on,” she said. “It takes that terror of action away.”

One of the first New Jersey townships to become certified was Cherry Hill, just outside of Camden. “We started with just a few community members who recognized that we needed to do something if we wanted to leave a better planet for our children and grandchildren,” said Lori Braunstein, Executive Director of Sustainable Cherry Hill.

Sustainable New Jersey founders:
Donna Drewes, Fred Profeta, and Randall Solomon

 “We had made some progress with partnering with the mayor’s office, but Sustainable Jersey gave us a framework that was driven by research and professional expertise. It gave us a roadmap to sustainability so that we knew where to go and how to get there.”

Sustainable New Jersey's certification guidelines are more rigorous than many other similar programs. Its menu of required action items covers three pillars of sustainability: “planet, prosperity, and people”—in other words, the environment, local economies, and social equity.

Some actions, such as energy audits for municipal buildings, help towns conserve energy and resources. Others focus on community health, such as improving physical education requirements in schools.

Sustainable Jersey’s program emphasizes the importance of strengthening local economies and promoting social equity. Communities can address these issues by recognizing local green businesses or conducting education programs on “environmental justice”--the right to equal access to a healthy environment.

For example, Cherry Hill, a bedroom community of Philadelphia with a large college-educated population, formed an environmental justice task force that has partnered with the nearby city of Camden, one of the nation’s most impoverished and environmentally degraded cities. The city and suburb are sharing knowledge and forming a cooperative working relationship.

Andrea Ferich and her junior gardeners took some time out to teach kids, teachers and parents from CH East, Beck Middle School and Woodcrest Elementary about sustainable gardening.

Citizens from Cherry Hill and Camden’s Waterfront South neighborhood work together, side-by-side, on gardening projects and come together for film screenings and forums about how the two communities are interconnected. “Our philosophy is that this is a conversation for everybody to have—and not just environmentalists,” Braunstein said. “We try and find an entry point for everyone and to support them in moving their passion forward.”

Sustainable Jersey’s certification program is serving as an effective rallying point for individuals and communities to work together, and its innovative use of healthy competition has helped the program spread virally across the state. Municipalities earn points for completing sustainability actions and are awarded with increasing levels of certification. With towns competing to “out-green” each other, local mayors are seeing a surge of demand from communities to register for the program.

“The constructive competitiveness of local governments drives a lot of the program’s growth,” Drewes said. “And Sustainable Jersey is a venue that allows leaders and citizens to show their progress and be recognized for it.”

Sustainable Jersey was a competition contestant in the Changemaker’s Strong Communities challenge last month and took home a winning spot. "The Changemakers competition brought our communities together in a whole new way," said Kristy Ranieri, Sustainable Jersey’s outreach coordinator.

Home grown

"We got the vote out through social media, and local individuals were just so excited about it. Sustainable Jersey reaches down to the level of the individual in each community, and winning the award was a win for them."

Now, New Jersey’s sustainability movement is set to expand even further with support from Walmart. The corporation has partnered with Sustainable Jersey to offer grants for participating communities to complete their projects.

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