Sustainable Seattle has teamed up with Green Lake, Greenwood and Rainier Beach to complete a pilot of their Neighborhood Actions for Building Resilience and Sustainability (NABRS) Project.

The project aims to meet community goals surrounding building healthy communities, economies and ecosystems.

This spring, Sustainable Seattle was granted a city Small and Simple grant of about $8,000 from the Department of Neighborhoods for the project.

“This is a continuation of the kind of work we’ve been doing over 15 years now,” Sean Schmidt, director of NABRS and acting executive director of Sustainable Seattle said. “It’s looking at how we’re performing in certain areas and how we can do better.”

As a first step, NABRS will develop a template for a Neighborhood Sustainability Scorecard. The Scorecard will be a standard set of indicators to see how the pilot neighborhoods, Green Lake, Greenwood and Rainier Beach, are doing in terms of meeting their community goals, as well as a way neighborhoods can compare their efforts with those of other neighborhoods, said Schmidt.

They will then complete the Scorecard for both neighborhoods and work with those communities to complete two projects.

“Part of this is getting information at higher levels,” said Schmidt. “For example a community county agency that focuses on social community and health may want to know what is happening at the neighborhood level and what they can do to improve what they are doing.”

The neighborhood action projects will be selected based on those indicators from the Scorecard that relate to climate change and environmental health.

In March and April, NABRS used the preexisting framework of indicators at B-sustainable.org and consulted with local experts from agencies and organizations like Communities Count, King County Department of Natural Resources and Parks, and the Seattle Departments of Transportation and Planning and Development, to establish a list of 92 potential neighborhood indicators.

An example of a few decided upon indicators include:
Natural Environment Indicator-Pollution in Neighborhoods-air and soil
Built Environment Indicator-Food Production-location and amount of gardens and fruit trees
Social Environment Indicator-Arts and Culture-number of arts and culture organizations and establishments
Personal Environment Indicator-On-time High School Graduation Rate

With a core set of indicators now at hand, the Scorecard will be use for the pilot effort beginning this summer.

“We hope that these pilot communities will help us to expand this project down the road to neighborhoods across King County,” Schmidt said.

To see indicators utilized for the Neighborhood Sustainability Scorecard visit B-Sustainable.org or for more information contact Sean Schimdt at ed@sustainableseattle.org.