Climate change solutions, one cup of joe at a time

Our friends at Green Mountain Coffee have joined with our other friends at JustMeans.com for the Changing Climate Change Challenge. Green Mountain is making four separate grants, each for $200,000, to support work on reducing climate change--and we need your help to win one of the grants!

Please go to our competition entry page (we're listed as One Sky) in the “Building Political Will” section. Vote for us, and please post a comment. Part of the criteria to get to the final round is getting a lot of votes.

Working in fundraising, my coffee intake is directly related to how productive I am. So when I saw that Green Mountain Coffee partnered with JustMeans on the Changing Climate Change Challenge, I saw the perfect storm--in a good way. Green Mountain's grants will support work on reducing climate change in four important areas:

• Threats to Coffee-Growing Communities
  
  
• Transportation-Related Emissions
  
  
• Building Political Will
  
  
• Empowering Individual Action

I know that no company is perfect, but not all companies give away $800,000 to address core climate issues, either. You can check out their social responsibility cred here.

The best part: they’re using this process to get ideas on how to make a difference. That’s where 1Sky comes in. We’ve submitted our ‘idea’ on "Building Political Will." Why? As their guidelines state:

…effective government action will be central to addressing climate change on a national and global level. In our country, this kind of action will be driven by the will of the American people to address and solve this challenge.

That describes us--and you--perfectly.

The rules are simple: They’ll choose finalists by March 21, and winners in early April (short notice, I know). Please go to our competition entry page (we're listed as One Sky--I know, their site wouldn’t let us spell our own name correctly) in the “Building Political Will” section. Vote for us, and don't forget to leave a comment! Then follow that up by giving a shout out to your friends on Facebook and other social netoworks to vote for us too.

There are a lot of great groups and great ideas on the contest site, but we could definitely use that level of funding to ensure that we have bold climate policy in place as soon as possible. Please vote today!