Joining state agencies at the table

Guest Perspective: Patricia Dowd, Serve Colorado

Much of this toolkit highlights the importance of working with a wide range of stakeholders from the initial concept stage of a climate corps, through the design of the initiative, and during the implementation.

State agencies with conservation, environmental, and particularly climate-related responsibilities represent a distinctive stakeholder cohort that are vital to the formation and implementation of a comprehensive statewide climate corps initiative. Given their responsibilities, existing initiatives, and potential funding avenues, state agencies emerge as strong partners in fostering support. Within this framework, state service commissions — typically integrated into or affiliated with state governance — are in a unique position to engage and partner with peer state agencies. However, those unaccustomed to collaborating with their peers across agencies, particularly organizations engaging in climate change mitigation work, might perceive the prospect of working with a commission as a daunting endeavor.

In this article, Serve Colorado shares how our commission works with state agencies on the Colorado Climate Interagency Team to position Colorado’s Climate Corps successfully.

Serve Colorado’s Alignment with the Governor’s Goals

Serve Colorado, located within the Office of the Lieutenant Governor, administers Colorado’s AmeriCorps State programs. As such, Serve Colorado is part of the governor’s portfolio of programming and works to implement the administration’s climate goals. These goals directly and indirectly guide Serve Colorado’s Colorado Climate Corps, Conservation Corps, environmental education, food security, resilience, and conservation AmeriCorps programs throughout the state.

Participating in Colorado’s Interagency Climate Team

Since Serve Colorado operates within the Governor’s Office, our staff also actively participate in the Colorado Interagency Climate Team. This membership has greatly benefitted the Colorado Climate Corps, particularly during Colorado’s initial stages of developing ideas to effectively tackle the multifaceted challenges posed by climate change.

In collaboration with members of the Colorado Interagency Climate Team, Serve Colorado identified the following sectors as high priority issue areas for service programs to address health and resiliency of public lands, mitigation of wildfires and floods, increased public awareness of climate change and its impacts, support for marginalized communities, and energy and water efficiency projects and weatherization. In response, Serve Colorado successfully secured $1.7 million of American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds and worked with Colorado Youth Corps Association to place the first 633 AmeriCorps members of the Climate Corps on the ground in 2022. These first members focused on water and energy efficiency projects and wildfire mitigation.

As this initiative got underway, the Climate Team also recognized the importance of supporting local governments and nonprofits in planning for and addressing sustainability and climate change issues as additional service opportunities. In 2023, Serve Colorado brought CivicSpark into the state to support up to 15 members a year. CivicSpark hosts members who serve in capacity building roles aimed at developing and strengthening local and state policy plans and action.

Having a seat at the table has been invaluable for Serve Colorado in a myriad of important ways. Addressing climate mitigation and adaptation issues involves technical and scientific expertise that spans many disciplines far beyond the knowledge and skills of our commission. Working more closely with other members of the Interagency Climate Team allows us to benefit from their climate expertise, so we can focus on our service expertise.

Being on the Interagency Climate Team did not just carve a pathway for AmeriCorps programs to become more central to Colorado’s climate action efforts; it has served as an avenue for collaboration with our peer state agencies. This created near-term additional benefits from greater engagement with and progress on workforce development efforts, opening new doors within state agencies who want to learn more about and potentially partner on service initiatives (including hosting their own members), and a series of public events that leverage the boots-on-the-ground aspect of AmeriCorps to bring more local and state leaders into conversation around climate change goals.

By aligning grassroots efforts with state goals, unlocking additional funding for climate activities, and fostering AmeriCorps’ inclusion in state agency programs, we have created a successful model of collaboration between state agencies and a state climate corps that is just beginning to take root in Colorado.

Lessons Learned from Climate Corps

Having a seat at the table with other state agencies has taught us many lessons about how to integrate service into climate change action in Colorado.

• Craft a great story; the more people who know about your program, the better. Colorado’s Climate Corps is our own. It reflects not just our climate risks, but our culture, priorities, and response capacities. By working with Colorado’s Interagency Climate Team, we started to build a story that reflected who we are and where we want to go. We scheduled meetings with key state agency staff at site visits to showcase the fantastic work happening in communities in our state. We have also used every opportunity to share that story with local, state, and national leaders. This served as a way to share more about our state’s climate corps program and remind state agencies that AmeriCorps members are a great resource.

  As an example, to celebrate Colorado Day on August 1, 2022, Governor Polis, Lieutenant Governor Primavera, leadership from the AmeriCorps agency, El Paso County Commissioners, and other local elected officials visited a Colorado Climate Corps sawyer crew in Green Mountain Falls to learn more about a wildfire mitigation project. Members engaged in activities such as reducing canopy cover, thinning trees, and making fire breaks to help reduce the potential for catastrophic wildfires on land adjacent to the town.

• Find allies; you cannot build a climate corps on your own*.* At the beginning of our initiative, we reached out to experts at other state agencies, our federal partners (including Congressman Neguse), natural resource and climate policy advisors in the Governor’s Office, and staff in other state departments (such as agriculture, the tribal commission, and the state’s energy office) who helped us identify needs and the most invested parties to support a climate corps.

  The bold climate goals of the Polis-Primavera Administration, their commitment to reducing the risk of wildfires, and their empowering of local communities to devise sustainability strategies and embrace clean energy were pivotal in creating the concept of a Colorado Climate Corps. Congressman Neguse’s leadership in Congress to create a national conservation corps helped Colorado secure federal funding to start our own climate corps. In addition to our state and federal partners, we worked hand in hand with the Colorado Youth Corps Association (CYCA) to develop the Colorado Climate Corps program — essentially granting CYCA additional funds so members could serve on climate corps specific projects.

  We are continuing to strengthen our relationships with state agencies, Congressman Neguse, and CYCA. Last fall, Congressman Neguse cohosted a service town hall event with the Colorado Department of Natural Resources, Colorado Parks and Wildlife, and the Larimer County Conservation Corps (part of the Colorado Climate Corps). Attendees participated in a wildfire mitigation project at Lory State Park, where they worked to clear brush, remove understory, and pile slash for removal. Following the service project, Congressman Neguse hosted a town hall meeting, where corps members, invited guests, and state agency staff asked questions, learned about conservation efforts occurring in Congress and in the state, and shared success stories about the Colorado Climate Corps.

• Ask for what you need; other agencies do not know how climate corps (or maybe even AmeriCorps) work, so you need to tell them. We identified what we needed in order to make our climate corps successful, both logistically and financially. We then identified key staff, partners, and members of the administration and shared what we needed to make our programs successful. We requested to bring in the governor during a climate corps launch to highlight the alignment with the governor’s goals and underscore the importance of the program. We also asked state agencies to partner with local governments and nonprofits to request funding (state and federal funding, including IIJA and IRA funds) to ensure the program, once established, could be sustainable.

  You may successfully design and build a climate corps at the commission, but it cannot operate in a vacuum. To build a climate corps that reflects the full suite of state priorities and goals and one that can reach the scale and durability such an initiative needs, you are going to need strong state partners. We hope our story, the lessons above, and the action steps below help you to get a seat at your table.