City of Fort Collins – Laurel Kruke – 2023

Goals

The City of Fort Collins strives to ensure all community members benefit from climate action and has embedded equity within their climate, waste, and energy plan, Our Climate Future. The Climate Team requested a fellow to help identify ways to assess equity and resilience within the context of climate action projects. They also needed support to complete their annual CDP submission.

Solutions

Laurel participated in bi-weekly meetings of the Equity and Resilience Assessment Working Group, supported the co-leads to develop productive agendas for the group, contributed to group discussions, and took notes during each meeting. She also worked with her host to synthesize conversations and strategize about climate equity pathways and potential metrics-prioritization for assessing and communicating equity progress in the context of Our Climate Future.

In addition to the equity assessment discussions, Laurel collaborated with staff around the City (and in the County) to gather data for Fort Collins’ annual CDP submission. This effort included documenting goals, projects, and actions from various departments and service areas to help describe how the City is meeting its ambitious climate, energy, waste, and transportation goals. 

Potential Impact

Laurel documented the climate equity pathway conversations and provided a framework and examples that the Climate Team can use moving forward when discussing equity outcomes and assessments with project teams in the future. She also began to prioritize 1-2 potential metrics for each of the “Our Climate Future Big Moves” that could be used to start a discussion about what is available and what is still needed to adequately assess equity for climate action.

Additionally, she created tools that will help streamline the CDP data gathering and reporting processes for next year’s submission.