To create a comprehensive, equitable, and socially just sustainability, climate action, and resilience plan for Indianapolis, with actions initially implemented within revitalization-focused neighborhoods.

Lessons about strategies, tools, and tactics that other sustainability directors could use to advance their work.

The Great Places demonstration projects serve as the initial implementation pieces of Thrive Indianapolis by supporting community-identified solutions to problems such as high levels of pollution, obesity, high unemployment and poverty rates, access to life sustaining and quality of life resources, and population loss to surrounding counties. The demonstration projects streamlined the transition from planning to action and provided the City with an opportunity to adjust the process for future replication in neighborhoods across the city. The Ambassadors and community partner organizations provided the conduit that allowed communities to see their planning contributions become a reality.

Lessons for developing a collaborative relationship between a local government sustainability director and local place-based foundation(s)

The resilience ambassador and place-based demonstration project grant program showed the vital role community activism, placemaking, and neighborhood organizations play in furthering the development of our most vulnerable to climate change and disaster communities. This project demonstrated how city agencies can partner with community leaders and organizers to bring city plans ideas to life. Through this program each Great Places Neighborhood embodied the goals and objectives of Thrive Indianapolis and their Great Places Plan in an individualized manner that addresses their community’s greatest needs. This program not only demonstrated to other communities that the goals and objectives in these plans can be acted upon on a small level, but they reinforce the principle that community-based organizations are pivotal implementation partners.