Carrboro opens application for third year of Green Neighborhood Grant Program

The Town of Carrboro recently opened the application for its Green Neighborhoods Grant Program, which provides funding for local environmental projects within neighborhoods to combat climate change.

Projects can receive up to $2,500 in funding for efforts to reduce emissions, enhance ecosystem resiliency and increase climate awareness. In an email, Carrboro's Chief Sustainability Officer Amy Armbruster said the Town hopes to award 10 grants this year. 

Now in its third year, the Green Neighborhoods Grant was established in response to the Community Climate Action Plan, which committed Carrboro to reducing 80 percent of greenhouse gas emissions per capita by 2030. The grant funded multiple projects last year, including the Forest and Streambank Restoration in Bolin Forest and Forest Court Stormwater Rain Garden.

The Town assesses applications for the grant based on seven scoring criteria, which are racial equity and climate justice, project impact, project planning and design, neighborhood participation and support, project engagement, finances, and whether the applicant is applying for the first time. Projects must be ran by community members and completed within six months of receiving the grant. 

“Part of the idea for this project is to help inspire people and have projects that are a model that other communities can follow,” Environmental Sustainability Coordinator Laura Janway said. “And so, I think the more ways that you can think to connect people and bring people together, it's all really going to be helpful, and people scoring them, [they'll] say ‘Okay, this is actually a framework that other communities can use.’”

Racial equity and climate justice is the main tenant of the grant program with the highest available points being 30, compared to other categories which have 20 points or less. The Strayhorn Community Garden, which was funded by the grant program in 2023, achieved both of these goals by working on restoring native plants to the area and sharing local Black history through the Strayhorn family, one of the first Black families that lived in Carrboro.  

“We know that low-income households and communities of color are disproportionately impacted by climate change,” Armbruster said. “They are often the ones who are hurt first and worst [by] things like heat waves and flooding, so I would love to see creative applications from the community that directly serve low-income, historically Black and Brown communities of color.” 

Community member Carrie Donley won one of the 2023 grants for her Fairoaks HOA Composting program, which she said she proposed after noticing a disconnect between her environmentally conscious neighbors and a lack of accessible local compost points. Before she received the grant, Donley said she composted her neighbors' pumpkins after Halloween for five years and became known as the “pumpkin lady.”

Since September 2023 up until last month, Donley's program has diverted 26,806 pounds of food waste from landfills, equating to 2,789 pounds of methane. The Fairoaks HOA Composting leadership team released a survey to community members regarding their food choices, which resulted in 53 percent of survey respondents saying they had considered alternatives to reduce their food waste.

Additionally, Donley said four other neighborhoods — Barred Owl Creek, Twin Magnolias, Wexford and The Cedars — joined the Fairoaks HOA Composting framework, launching their own composting programs.

“There's all these people who compost in their backyard, and they do what they can, but there's not a whole lot of outlets for them to do more and to have a bigger impact,” Donley said. “So, that's one of the things that I think is really important about this project, is that it's given normal people the ability to do something on a slightly larger scale.”

However, Donley said she thinks the Town may not have considered the long-term impact of funding projects. Given the grant cycles annually, she said recipients are often nervous because they do not know if they will receive the same funding the following year. She also said expansion of the grant is difficult as Chapel Hill does not have an equivalent program for neighborhoods.

“That's the other reason I really want Orange County to take this on county-wide, because then I'm not burdening Carrboro on an annual basis,” Donley said. “So, I guess what I'm trying to do is put some positive peer pressure on the Town of Carrboro to help us push Orange County to implement this on a wider scale.”

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