January 2017 | Business View Magazine

110 111 AT A GLANCE Green communities canada WHAT: A national association of commu- nity organizations that help people go green WHERE: Peterborough, Ontario WEBSITE: www.greencommunities canada.org home communities; they partner extensively with municipalities, social organizations, and the media. The kinds of things that they do range widely, so we work with people where they’re at and with the concerns that they have. We’re diverse in the activities that we undertake and we move in many different circles, often playing a leadership role.” Over the years, Green Communities Canada has helped hundreds of thousands of Canadi- ans save energy and other resources, reduce pollution, and contribute to healthy ecosys- tems. “Our goal is to bring environmentally sound practices into the mainstream,” Maynes declares. “Home energy and commercial effi- ciency has been a core activity for many of our members, and for many years, we delivered, on a very large scale, home energy audits. There Green Communities Canada was a program in Canada that we initially designed and piloted, where the government sent a check to homeowners, based on their achieved improvement in energy efficiency. And so, this drove tens of thou- sands of energy audits.” Another key initiative of Green Communities Can- ada concerns the management of water resources –how to manage private wells in order to protect ground water and drinking water supplies, and how to manage rain water in order to reduce stormwa- ter runoff pollution. One of its programs is called Depave Paradise. “Our member organizations in the community, or partners that we’re working with, will find some unused piece of pavement, and we work with them to organize volunteers to tear up the pavement,” Maynes explains. “It becomes a garden,