Mayor’s Sustainability Summit III :: implement

Mayor Francis Slay has convened his third sustainability summit, a three-day event full of ideas and tools for neighborhoods, organizations and companies to help implement the City's first Sustainability Plan.

In 2011, Mayor Slay started the City's sustainability planning process by asking the community to imagine a more socially, economically and environmentally sustainable City of St. Louis, then devise ways to get there.  The first two summits laid the imaginative foundation for the third one. Now, the City is in an excellent position to collectively implement the City of St. Louis Sustainability Plan and the high-priority Mayor's Sustainability Action Agenda.

"Sustainability is going to look and feel different to everyone," said Mayor Slay.  "We have a Sustainability Plan with some 1,000 ideas of things to do to make the City more livable, vibrant, healthy, diverse and successful.  And, we have a shorter and more focused agenda that I have asked City departments to focus on. The most important thing is for everyone to do what they can.  No matter how small it may seem on an individual basis, collectively that is the only way to make an impact."

The complete Mayor's Sustainability Summit III :: implement agenda can be found here. Registration and community participation opportunities kick off Wednesday, November 6, 2013at 6 p.m. at Steinberg Auditorium at Washington University's Danforth Campus. Andrew Howard, from Team Better Block, will provide the keynote* address, followed by Mayor Slay's presentation of the Mayor's Sustainability Awards at 8:15 p.m.

Events continue on Thursday(invitation only) and Saturday(open to the public). 

To help neighbors get involved on the ground level, City Sustainability Director Catherine Werner and her team have created a robust Sustainable Neighborhood Toolkit of information, resources and even some opportunities to receive funding to implement ideas. On Saturday, community stakeholders, like neighborhood associations, can attend workshops on how to implement sustainability at the neighborhood scale, and to hear from neighborhood leaders who brought seven terrific sustainable neighborhood small grant projects to life.

"We spent more than two years listening to and working with the community to develop an award-winning Sustainability Plan," Catherine Werner, the City's Sustainability Director, said. "While implementation progress has been made along the way, we are now at critically important juncture:  we must shore up existing partnerships and significantly expand upon them. It is only through broad community support and participation that we will realize our City's sustainability goals."

*About the Keynote Speaker: Andrew C. Howard, AICP, is an urban planner from Dallas. He is the co-founder of the Build a Better Block project and a Principal at Team Better Block LLC. Now being used in more than 50 cities and three countries, the Better Block demonstrates how temporary sustainability improvements to a single city block can build momentum for long-term financial, social and environmental advancements.