One Island – Green Living Institute Project, Whidbey

PO Box 285   Langley, WA 98260      whidbey@one-island.org

 To: Potential  Project Partners for the

Whidbey-based Green Living Institute Project

 From: Marcy Montgomery, Director

One Island Green Living Institute

 August 28, 2009

Greetings,

 You are invited to learn about a new project being formulated on South Whidbey that is looking at ways to develop a collaboratively-built local green economy that retains families and youth in our local community and assists with energy efficiency retrofits to improve our housing options. The One Island, Whidbey project was launched last year as the outcome of a retreat up at Hollyhock on Cortes Island and is looking to bring together complimentary interests in sustainable agriculture, food supply, renewable energy, community housing, health and wellness, and transportation.

 Here on Whidbey, with all of the great innovative intellectual capital and non-profit groups, we see the potential of bringing together a small group of organizations to collaborate on the shared purpose of developing a green local economy that builds a sustainable, healthy and vibrant community on South Whidbey for people of all ages. Each of your groups is already working on its own objectives towards this goal and we suspect that by forming an inter-organization working group we can leverage our creative problem solving and new grant funding to create a mutually beneficial model for successful green collaboration.

 In speaking with USDA Rural Development this summer, we have been encouraged to apply for matching funding to establish a capacity building project that helps each partner organization more fully develop its ability to deliver green economic and housing development services to its clients and constituents. If you would be interested in learning more about this opportunity, we invite you to attend a lunch round table discussion in Langley on Friday the 11^th of September. We will be hosting a BYOLunch conversation, noon-2pm, at the South Whidbey Commons meeting space and invite your organization to participate.

 Topics that will be covered include:

• Scope of proposed Green Living Institute Project
• What our groups are currently doing in the Green field
• Collaborators with synergistic potential
• Audiences to target services for
• Creative ideas for fostering new and expanded green economic development projects i.e. car share, alternative energy, housing weatherization, green tourism, affordable housing, sustainable agriculture, youth hostel, medical tourism, arts festivals, continuing education
• How matching funding from USDA works
• Next steps

Please email us at whidbey@one-island.org  if you can attend or to share ideas for this project. You can see examples of other projects One Island hosts at www.one-island.org/hawaii .

 We look forwards to hearing from you.

Marcy Montgomery