Interviewing Jensen Morgan with the City of Fort Collins’ Environmental Services on Sustainability Initiatives
I sat down with Jensen Morgan near his office on behalf of Beyond the Oval to get information on the city’s current initiatives for our environment, how to get involved, and to introduce some fun events happening around Fort Collins for these initiatives. Jensen Morgan is the Senior Environmental Sustainability Specialist, a CSU alumnus, and runs Climate Action and Community Engagement for the City of Fort Collins.
Q: Can you tell me more about Shift?
A: Shift is an environmental behavior change campaign to help our community achieve our climate action goals, we’re trying to help our community “Shift” what matters most. What we’re doing is helping the community save time, energy, and money for what matters most in their daily lives. In our past work, we’ve really tried to give folks a whole suite of options and we found that can be overwhelming. And so, we’ve designed this outreach campaign, this behavior change campaign to provide folks with three options at any one time that are simple, easy, and accessible. At least one of them we hope everyone is able to do. For example, this fall we have “Shift your mug.” We’re encouraging folks to throw away less paper or plastic cups and bring their reusable coffee cup when they go to a coffee shop. That’s something many folks should be able to do, and it’s not like “get solar panels on your roof,” it’s not highly expensive. It’s supposed to be as accessible as possible.
Q: Can you tell me a little more about accessibility within sustainable programming here in Fort Collins?
A: Yeah, so I think one of the big conversations we’re having right now at the city is around equity, and I know our City Council has made that one of their new top priorities. The city organization as a whole is starting to have these conversations and we’re at the very beginning, I would say, of that conversation. And we really want to integrate equity into our climate action work. We’re trying to pilot and learn and certainly we’re making mistakes along the way, but we’re trying to get better bit by bit.
And so, we have an engagement process that we’re rolling out here this fall and into next year, called Our Climate Future. It is an update to three strategic plans that the city has, our energy policy, which includes renewable energy/energy efficiency programs. Then we have our road to zero waste plan, which is trying to reduce what’s going to the landfill and hopefully get to a point where there is no waste or trash. Everything can be a resource. How do we recycle, repurpose, reuse everything that we have in the community? Then finally our third is the climate action plan which we updated last in 2015.
So, we’re trying to update all of these plans at the same time because we need to reach out to a lot of the same community members during the process and we don’t want to reach out multiple times for each plan. But in terms of your question around equity and accessibility, we’re really trying to improve our approach to equity and the engagement process through Our Climate Future. And so, we have talked a lot about both in terms of the process of the plan itself, but also in terms of the strategies and outcomes.
So, we are working to make sure that, as much as possible, we are tracking demographics for folks that we’re engaging. It’s important to engage community members that have been historically underrepresented in past climate action plan processes. So communities of color or people experiencing disabilities or people under the age of 29. We found that we don’t tend to engage those folks as much as we should and would like to in our past climate action planning processes. So we’re trying to get better at that. The two major ways we’re doing that is through what we call community partners and plan ambassadors, which is something that we are learning and kind of evolving from city plan, which was a large-scale engagement process last year around land use and transportation. So, community partners or organizations that we’re paying to actually go out and do engagement.
Through the Our Climate Future process we are running two outreach methods: Community Partners and Plan Ambassadors. Essentially, we’re paying the community to engage other people in Fort Collins who have been historically underrepresented. We’re working with the Center for Public Deliberation at CSU to train the Community Partners and Plan Ambassadors how to facilitate, and then we’ll give the partners and ambassadors funds to pay for childcare services at their events, or to pay for translation, or whatever they think they need to engage the community, including paying their staff for their time. Cause we feel, especially in terms of equity, the city isn’t always the best one to actually go out and do the engagement. How can we, as much as possible, encourage the community itself to lead these conversations. Community Partners are organizations and Plan Ambassadors will be individuals who facilitate engagement. That will kind of take place over the next year and they’ll host a certain number of gatherings they’ve agreed to. We’re really hoping to connect more with the Latinx community as well as many other historically underrepresented communities in Fort Collins.
Q: How can people get involved with this program? Especially if, let’s say, they’re a little bit intimidated to come all the way to the city building or to send an email?
A: Yeah, totally. We have a website that I’ll recommend. It’s ourcity.fcgov.com/ourclimatefuture. That is where we are going to be posting about the process. We have our applications up right now and we’d love people to apply. It closes on Wednesday, October 2nd, [2019] so next Wednesday. If anyone can sign up over the weekend, that would be awesome. We’d love to get more people from CSU, especially folks that can connect with some of our historically underrepresented communities in Fort Collins. One of the big things we’re trying to do is lead with racial equity in our work. So if there are students of color that really have strong connections in the community, that would like to apply to be a Plan Ambassador, we would love for them to apply at that website. We also have applications in Spanish too. If there are folks that prefer to answer their questions or whatever in Spanish, we have that ability [to take those applications] as well.
Q: That’s a great resource to know, thank you. What would the ideal Fort Collins look like to you when it comes to sustainability?
A: Great question! So funny enough, that is actually a similar question to what we’re asking the community right now. There are three phases in the Our Climate Future process and we have five questions in phase one. Phase one is called understanding community priorities. Kind of this high level, really just trying to listen phase. Phase two is called Strategic Planning and then phase three is plan adoption and kind of the dialogue between City Council and the community. We’re currently in phase one, and phase one will go until December of this year and then phase two will begin in January.
Our first question in Phase one is, “when you imagine a sustainable Fort Collins what comes to mind?” And then question number two is “what could keep us from getting there?” My personal answer to this question, what would a sustainable Fort Collins look like? I think I would always come back to the triple bottom line definition of sustainability. So, people, planet, profit or equity, economics, and environment. There are so many different ways of thinking about it but I think what it really comes down to is how do we make sure there is wellbeing for everyone in our community related to, you know, economic vitality. Can people afford to live here? Can people have good, high-quality jobs that pay them well and [where] they feel valued? Can they live in a community that has great air quality, that has good responsiveness and adaptation to climate change, that is working to create a carbon-free future? I think those are all the different ways. I mean, equity to me is the core to all of that. You know, I think sometimes folks think we can achieve economic vitality and we can achieve environmental sustainability without equity. But I think it’s impossible. I mean, I think you might be able to achieve it maybe in the short term. But unless you really have been honest, transparent, and dive right into the heart of equity issues, those things are going to crumble your work overtime. Right? You have to have that social resilience, that equitable benefit for everybody, I think, to have long term success.
Q: Because of some studies, there’s been a common belief that the effects of homelessness cause additional waste at times due to lack of access. How do you think affordable housing could possibly curb some of those problems? And is the city currently doing anything related to that?
A: That’s a really good question. I’m not an expert on affordable housing but there are others here at the City who work tirelessly to support people experiencing homelessness. However, my personal perspective is that a lot of times folks that are lower income or are experiencing homelessness are actually less impactful in a lot of ways because affluence and money tends to correlate with [greater] waste. And so, I think there’s a myth that low-income folks are the most wasteful, when you look at the data, that’s not always the case.
Q: I noticed the phrase carbon-neutral or carbon-free future a lot in the city’s goals online. What does that mean?
A: That’s a great question. I think in reality, we’re still figuring that out. You know, I think we set our climate goals intentionally to reach for the stars. You know, a moonshot.
We’re celebrating 20 years of climate action and climate policy in Fort Collins on November 14th. It’ll be at the Lincoln center in the Canyon West room. We’ll be posting RSVPs for that at fcgov.com/climateaction in October. It will be open to the community and family-friendly. We’re going to have activity booths and a panel with kids as well as adults.
We have been working for a long time in Fort Collins on climate policy, and slowly we have made more and more aggressive goals and the world has taken notice. I mean, to my understanding, we have some of the most aggressive goals in the world in terms of climate action and we had them sooner than a lot of other places. I think on the flip side of that is that we don’t have all the answers to how we will achieve them. I think just as the people who said, “let’s land on the moon by the end of the decade”, didn’t really know how they’re going to land on the moon, we’ve done something similar in the world with our climate goals. It’s important to set those moonshot goals because that can allow and force innovation in a way that wouldn’t happen otherwise. So, carbon-neutral future. I think there’s a lot of discussion internationally, nationally and locally about what does that look like? Does it have to do with transportation infrastructure? Does it mean we’ll have autonomous Tesla Ubers going around everywhere? I don’t know. That could be part of it. I think it will be contextual. It depends on where you are. That has to make sense for that place. Some folks will say that means there are no emissions. Some will say net carbon, right? Net carbon neutral. So, for some people that might mean that while we do still produce emissions, we reduced them to almost neutral and we have found ways to offset or do carbon capture. I think there’s no one right way to get to carbon neutral. I think there are a lot of probably wrong ways to get to carbon neutral and I think it’s going to be something that we will have to evolve and work on. We’re pretty confident right now that we’re going to achieve our 2020 goal with some margin for error. But we, at this point, we don’t know how we’re going to get to our 2030 goal, let alone the 2050 goal. We have ideas, but that’s part of what the Our Climate Future process is about, is to ask our community “what is the city’s role in the transformation here in the community versus the community’s role”, and how much does the community want the city to just do it? Because, I think sometimes folks in the community want to go “Hey city, you figure this out.” But the transformation has to do with behavior. And, how much are folks really going to listen to the city saying, “Hey, you should do this” versus the community having a movement like the climate strike, like there has to be, I think, some grassroots momentum to change how we think about our lifestyle. And that’s, that’s not really the role of the city. That’s the role of the community, so I don’t know. I think it’ll be, I think this can be an adventure and I think it’ll be a lot of learning along the way for all of us.
Q: Does anyone from the City of Fort Collins working in environmental services plan on going and attending the climate strike to recruit for these groups?
A: Oh, that’s a great question! We’re very careful as the city about riding this line between policy and then advocacy. Anyone as an individual is welcome to go out and advocate for the things they care about. To my knowledge, and I could be wrong, but to my knowledge I don’t think there’s anybody from the City going as a City representative to the climate strike. I think people are very intentional about that. You know what I mean? If they go into it as their own individual that’s different and that’s fine. But, I think because what we’re trying to do as City staff is respond to City Council’s direction we don’t want to be seen as city officials who are advocating for more or less aggressive goals. So, if the community pushes City Council to do something, then we’ll respond to it. But, I think we’ve intentionally kind of stayed out of that, or at least I know I have, in order to really allow it to just be a community grassroots effort rather than something that City Staff are manipulating.
Q: Why did the city of Fort Collins choose 2020 and 2050 as their big “deadline” years? I noticed that was pushed on the website for climate goals. Is there any reason for choosing those years, maybe to promote urgency or something similar?
A: I think there is a probably a very specific reason that I’m unaware of. My knowledge outside of the city’s history, just knowing and having a conversation with other communities and how they set their goals, I think it comes down to building momentum. I remember hearing a podcast recently about the one and a half, two-degrees target for temperature. I don’t know if this is for sure true, but I recall the podcast saying the targets were just a couple scientists somewhere kind of throwing something on the board to get things started. That there’s not necessarily a lot of science to say this is exactly where we should be headed. At least that’s what I remember [hearing]. There’s a lot of science telling us what one and a half, two-degrees will potentially do the climate, using climate modeling. Should one and a half or two degrees be the target? I don’t know, but it’s a place to start, you know what I mean? And I think that’s important. I think that’s the same truth for how we set our goals. I think revisiting them occasionally and going, “Is this the right deadline? Should we be doing it sooner? Should we be doing it later?” is necessary. I think it’s about marketing and about momentum. Sometimes that’s almost more important than picking the perfect date you know, there’s something about 2020, 2030, 2050. There’s a ring to that and it’s easier for the public and community, I think to, to memorize and latch onto that. And sometimes that’s even more important than if we were to say 2031. Maybe that would be more technically accurate to the one and a half, two-degree mark. But coming up with something that the community can connect to and get behind and create momentum [around] is probably more powerful.
I also want to shout out that this weekend [September 29] is open streets. It’s a cool event, where they shut down an area that normally is drivable and they just have [drinks], events, parties, all sorts of stuff. And it’s just for alternative transportation. So, we’re going to have a booth there for the Shift campaign. We’re going to have a scavenger hunt. You can win a free bike if you complete the scavenger hunt. We have all sorts of cool swag, t-shirts, all this stuff. So definitely come check that out. And if you want to learn more about the Shift campaign, go to fcgov.com/shift and it’ll tell you all about it.
To learn more about the current programs the city is running related to climate, go to https://www.fcgov.com/climateaction/.
