Environmental Initiative

Clean air Minnesota: clean air Minnesota is a diverse coalition of air quality leaders convened by Environmental Initiative working together to reduce emissions from mobile sources, small businesses, and wood smoke. Partners form teams that coordinate, collaborate, and develop specific projects to reduce emissions from Minnesota's smaller, widespread and less regulated sources of air pollution which contribute nearly 75 percent of air pollution emissions in the state.

Midwest row crop collaborative: administered by Environmental Initiative, the midwest row crop collaborative explores and implements new approaches to agricultural challenges. The collaborative's members work together to find solutions that increase productivity while ensuring soil health, protecting water, addressing the factors contributing to climate change, and supporting farm families in the upper Mississippi river basin.

Policy and systems change: Environmental Initiative is a leader in identifying need for and convening to activate policy and systems change. After recognizing the need to confront the organization's mainstream, dominant white culture and approach to Environmental work, the staff, board, and sponsors, launched a journey of intentional dismantlement of existing frames. Through the policy forum series, the source water collaborative, and emerging partnerships within communities most impacted by systemic disenfranchisement, Environmental Initiative is working within itself and across difference to faciliate openness to address Environmental, economic, and public health issues between diverse stakeholders and work towards social equity and Environmental health for all.

Sustainable growth coalition: over 20 businesses and organizations form the sustainable growth coalition, a business-led partnership administered by Environmental Initiative harnessing member expertise to advance the next frontier of corporate sustainability - the circular economy. Determining projects that move toward a circular economy, the coalition members evaluate options through stakeholder, Environmental, economic, social wellness, and life-cycle lenses. Collaborative projects advance clean energy, convert organic waste into valuable resources, and protect or restore the natural water cycle with an ever-growing equity framework.

Agriculture: the agriculture program area is anchored by the headwaters agricultural sustainability partnership, a unique collaboration of partners in central Minnesota accelerating the development and implementation of farmer-led solutions that benefit the environment, economic viability of farmers, and vitality of rural communities. Convened by Environmental Initiative, the partnership offers innovations to accelerate continuous improvements in our environment, particularly for water quality, soil health, habitat, and climate protection.