Congregations
United by a common spiritual outlook and a sense of community, congregations are powerful forces to engage communities in taking action on climate change.
We all need to understand, reduce and account for our environmental impacts. Purchasing carbon offsets to “neutralize” your unavoidable emissions, however, generally has little transparency or meaning and is often compared to 16th century indulgences where parishioners could pay the church to absolve them of their sins. Rather than “buy a clean conscience”, we enable you to onset your unavoidable emissions and support meaningful projects in your own community (or even your own congregation!). Here’s how carbon onsetting works:
Create a “Team”: A Team is any size group connected through a common event or activity, such as group travel, a conference, or driving to and from your place of worship.
Choose a Project: We can help you identify a local solution to global warming that has meaning to your congregation. Projects are not limited to ones mitigating CO2 and we have a database of over 100,000 projects if you need help in finding one.
Measure Emissions: We provide you with custom calculators, materials, and reports that can engage your congregation in measuring, understanding, and tracking emissions from travel. We’re happy to offer technical support and consulting as needed.
Contribute Funds: Members contribute online and account for their unavoidable emissions based on the social cost of carbon, which is the best scientific estimate of the actual costs of emitting greenhouse gases. We also provide crowdfunding tools to solicit additional funding if desired.
Support the Project: We transfer collected funds to the projects you choose. Earth Deeds retains a 15% fulfillment fee to enhance our capacity to combat climate change and help other organizations become carbon conscious.
Celebrate: We offer social media tools to promote your efforts and the project you are supporting. We also can provide a Carbon Conscious ecolabel you can display on your website and materials.
Example #1 A congregation accounts for the unavoidable CO2 emissions from their daily lives and pays-it-forward by helping to fund solar panels on their own roof.
Example #2 An interfaith network onsets the emissions from participants travel to and from its annual conference and supports the local community homeless shelter to be able to purchase organic produce from a nearby farm.
