Approach

How We Work

City Scale facilitates learning, bridging, and alignment to support a new paradigm for local climate action.

We are engaging within and beyond our circle of known partners to understand, learn from, and bridge across a diversity of stakeholders and perspectives.

Climate change is the ultimate complex problem, spilling across every major issue facing communities and society. Yet people tackling climate have been highly siloed – by sector, issue, profession, geography…and beyond. Over and over again, we hear a similar question: How can we work together, across boundaries?

What We Believe

We believe that solutions tend to lie closest to the problems and that community-led efforts are critical to conceiving, creating and sustaining change. Supporting community leadership and local capacity building is essential.

We believe that climate justice and racial justice are inextricably linked. As a white-led initiative, we are listening and learning about how to center racial equity and justice in climate work.

We believe that local government, as the level of government closest to people and place, has a critical role to play in addressing the interconnected, systemic challenges and structural inequities at the root of the climate crisis. We recognize the long history and persistent power dynamics that exist between communities and government.

We believe that solving complex problems requires engaging as many perspectives as possible. Bridging across boundaries and differences is essential to effectively diagnose problems and generate solutions.

Our Vision

is for climate solutions to be broadly defined and deeply connected to community values and priorities, with inclusive and transparent governance models in place to support and sustain deep changes, ensuring that every community participates in and benefits from progress on climate.

Our Purpose

is to deepen a shared understanding of the current state of practice.

Our Goal

is to advance collective learning in order to co-create new approaches to integrated climate work at the local and regional scales.

Our Theory

IF we can break out of silos and work across boundaries THEN an ecosystem of allied efforts will generate more effective climate action.

What Our Partners Are Saying

"City Scale recruited and convened a group of climate practitioners across the country that were all independently looking for the next evolution of climate action planning. They organized and hosted a series of calls, took in the best thinking of the group and generated a cohesive statement of where we believe local government climate action needs to go to be truly transformative and meet carbon neutrality goals."

"City Scale has facilitated some of the most impactful meetings I’ve participated in, both among a large group of other sustainability professionals and in direct conversation. They have an incredible ability to cut through the noise and create a space for meaningful, outcome-oriented conversation on challenging topics about complicated systems."

"City Scale’s climate engagement database has helped us to understand trends in the South and to see more clearly how we might expand local government engagement beyond the South’s urban centers. They have partnered with us to explore how we can share the successes, failures, and opportunities of working at a regional scale."

"City Scale has become a go-to thought partner to USDN. They bring the experience of working inside local government, insights from the outside, and a commitment to honest inquiry."