On November 14th and 15th, the New England Municipal Sustainability (NEMS) Network gathered in Burlington, Vermont for their annual fall meeting. NEMS is a consortium of New England cities and towns that collaborate to build more sustainable communities. Their vision is to create a sustainable New England by building strong connections among municipal sustainability professionals throughout the region, allowing members to accomplish more than would be possible alone. NEMS is a recognized member of the Urban Sustainability Directors Network (USDN), and the UNH Sustainability Institute serves as the backbone organization for the NEMS Network, under the direction of Dr. Dovev Levine, Assistant Dean for Graduate Student Affairs, UNHSI Fellow, and Assistant Vice Provost for Outreach & Engagement at UNH. As a result of NEMS' connection to UNH, numerous undergraduate and graduate students have engaged in applied learning experiences that simultaneously have a direct impact to sustainability efforts at the municipal level and provide transformative learning opportunities. These experiences include work on a broad range of sustainability topics including renewable energy, social justice and equity, carbon emissions and climate resilience.
The NEMS fall meeting focused on sharing and developing key actions connecting community engagement methods to broader sustainability and climate-related efforts, with engagement experts from UNH's Carsey School for Public Policy (Dr. Carrie Portrie and Jo Field) and the NH Department of Environmental Services (Kurt Yuengling) prominently featured. Recognizing that sustainability and community engagement are tightly interwoven, members utilized the two-day gathering to discuss initiatives towards bolstering collaborative partnerships across New England in this vein. The meeting also included a tour of Burlington-based BETA Technologies who are developing electric planes—they had their first successful production aircraft flight in November that was built on their scaled production line!
For additional information in the NEMS Network, contact Dr. Dovev Levine at Dovev.Levine@unh.edu.
