12 Local Organizations to Receive $900,000 in Grants for Environmental Stewardship and Climate Resilience Projects

PRNewswire 10-Oct-2024 1:00 PM

PG&E and The PG&E Corporation Foundation Grant Programs Support Climate Action Key Investments for Local Communities

OAKLAND, Calif., Oct. 10, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Whether it's wildfires and unseasonable heat in the west or destructive hurricanes in the southeast, current climate impacts demand action. Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) and The PG&E Corporation Foundation (PG&E Foundation) have awarded $900,000 through two grant programs to support climate resilience efforts in PG&E's hometowns, while also protecting and restoring land, water, and air in habitats and communities across California. Both grant programs prioritize projects that address the needs of disadvantaged and/or vulnerable communities.

• Through the Better Together Nature Positive Innovation grant program, the PG&E Foundation has awarded a combined $500,000 to five grantees — $100,000 in each of PG&E's five Northern and Central California regions — that preserve California's unique biodiversity, focusing on land, air quality and water stewardship.
  
  
• Separately, through the Resilience Hubs grant program, PG&E is providing a total of $400,000 to seven grantees — three $100,000 and four $25,000 grants to support communities in building a network of local climate resilience hubs.

"PG&E is committed to working with our local partners to develop new and innovative ways to build resilience amid the increasing impacts of climate change, as outlined in our Climate Strategy Report. We are all in this together and we simply cannot do this important work without these partner organizations helping to increase climate resilience and supporting equity in the communities we are so privileged to serve," said Carla Peterman, Executive Vice President, Corporate Affairs and Chief Sustainability Officer for PG&E Corporation and Chair of the Board for The PG&E Corporation Foundation.

Better Together Nature Positive Innovation Grants

As one of the largest landowners in California, PG&E has a long history of responsible stewardship of the natural environment. Through the Better Together Nature Positive Innovation grant program, the PG&E Foundation is reinforcing its focus on environmental stewardship and investing in partnerships that will protect and restore land, water, and air in habitats and communities across its service area.

For 2024, the Better Together Nature Positive Innovation grant program has awarded five $100,000 grants. These grants are funded by The PG&E Corporation Foundation. Charitable donations come from PG&E shareholders and other sources, not PG&E customers.

The following organizations are this year's Better Together Nature Positive Innovation grant recipients:  

• Land Partners Through Stewardship / LandPaths (Sonoma County) — supporting workforce development in forestry and fire management while building a sustainable forest management and prescribed burning program.
• El Dorado Fire Safe Council (El Dorado County) — providing financial assistance to help seniors, veterans, disabled individuals and low-income households make their homes more resilient to wildfires by performing defensible space work.
• Canopy (San Mateo County) — providing paid internship positions to BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) students who live or attend high school in East Palo Alto as part of the Teen Urban Forester program supporting expansion of the area's canopy cover.
• Kitchen Table Advisors (Santa Cruz and Monterey Counties) — supporting small-scale, socially disadvantaged regenerative farmers to adopt and implement conservation and climate smart agricultural practices on their farmlands.
• Sierra Foothill Conservancy (Mariposa County) — expanding capacity for cultural prescribed burn facilitation, interpretive elements and public outreach, Tribal placemaking, Indigenous workforce development, and increasing community resilience against natural disasters.

"The PG&E Better Together Nature Positive Innovation Grant award will provide valuable resources to Sierra Foothill Conservancy and the Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation to advance restoration, reduce wildfire risks and create outdoor spaces for people along the Mariposa Creek Parkway. This grant will be integral in supporting partnership development, community engagement, and ensuring that the maximum benefit for natural and human communities can be achieved through inclusive ecological restoration. PG&E's support is helping realize essential triple bottom line benefits of a healthy environment, community and local economy," said Bridget Fithian, Executive Director, Sierra Foothill Conservancy.

Resilience Hubs Grants

Recognizing that communities across California face growing threats from extreme weather events such as coastal and inland flooding, heat waves, wildfires, and more powerful storms, the Resilience Hubs grant program aims to fund and establish physical spaces, or a set of resources, that support community resilience — such as access to power, shelter and information — in the face of these climate-driven events. Once developed, these hubs can also be accessed year-round to build and sustain community-adaptive capacity in a trusted location.

For 2024, the Resilience Hubs grant program has awarded $400,000 to the seven organizations listed below. These grants will be funded by PG&E shareholders as part of the company's investments in statewide wildfire resiliency and response, in accordance with a mandate from the California Public Utilities Commission.

The program awarded $25,000 each to four Feasibility Projects to fund an assessment of resilience hub needs and/or conceptual ideas for a resilience hub:

• Empowering Marginalized Asian Communities (San Joaquin County) — for a feasibility analysis to assess the needs of a resilience hub at its offices, including staff training and assembling emergency preparedness kits.
• A. Philip Randolph Institute, San Francisco: Resilient Bayview's Community Resource (San Francisco County) — creating an extreme heat and poor air quality strategy to prepare local organizations for disaster preparedness and response roles.
• Fresno Interdenominational Refugee Ministries (Fresno County) — creating a comprehensive, community-driven plan for a resilience hub in one of California's most disadvantaged communities that provides a safe haven during climate emergencies (particularly extreme heat and wildfire smoke events), while serving as a year-round resource center.
• California Interfaith Power & Light (Alameda County) — determining the requirements and scope of a congregational climate resilience hub at the First Unitarian Church in West Oakland to best serve the community.

Additionally, the program awarded $100,000 each to three Design and Build Projects toward the design and/or creation of a resilience hub. Through these projects, the organizations will either plan and design new physical spaces or mobile resources, or retrofit existing buildings or structures to support community resilience:

• New Season Community Development Corporation (Yolo County) — creating a resilience hub at the new Yolo Food hub in unincorporated western Yolo County serving the county's 600 small farms, farmworkers and other rural food system workers during extreme weather, power outages and other emergencies.
• Merced Community Development Corporation (Merced County) — creating a mobile resilience pantry project to serve dual purposes as a regular food distribution pantry and as an emergency supply hub during climate-related and other emergencies.
• Sonoma Applied Villages Services (Sonoma County) — developing a mobile resilience hub to bring a minimum of 3,000 meals and weather protection to unhoused people living outside in Sonoma County during extreme weather events.

"We are thrilled that the PG&E Resilience Hubs program has chosen to support the new Yolo Food Hub. This grant will allow us to provide key resilience features to benefit Yolo County's 600 small farms, as well as local food businesses and food system workers, during extreme heat, smoke, power outages and severe weather events, increasing economic and community resilience in our rural region," said Jim Durst, Board President of New Season Community Development Corporation.

The next applications window for the Resilience Hubs grants will open later this year for grants to be awarded in 2025, the program's final year of funding.

About PG&E
Pacific Gas and Electric Company, a subsidiary of PG&E Corporation (NYSE:PCG), is a combined natural gas and electric utility serving more than 16 million people across 70,000 square miles in Northern and Central California. For more information, visit pge.com and pge.com/news.

About The PG&E Corporation Foundation
The PG&E Corporation Foundation is an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, separate from PG&E and sponsored by PG&E Corporation.

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/12-local-organizations-to-receive-900-000-in-grants-for-environmental-stewardship-and-climate-resilience-projects-302272683.html

SOURCE Pacific Gas and Electric Company