EnergyStar for Congregations

A great site for those parishes that want to use the free Portfolio Manager tool. Input your electric and gas data for the last 12 months, answer a couple of more questions and the PM will spit out a benchmark number that compares your parish with other parishes that are similar in size. Grace fared quite bad due to its old HVAC systems and lack of proper maintenance of the building. After benchmarking the fun begins. Once you dig deeper and are able to make substantial changes of your lighting or HVAC system you will see that number change, hopefully to the better. EnergyStar has some nifty tools to help understand what is needed at the building level and supports parishes with helpful handouts on environmental stewardship.

Episcopal Resources for Stewardship of Creation

Hello everyone,

There are many dioceses and other organizations doing great things with environmental stewardship. No need to re-invent the wheel when we can use some of what's already out there. For example:

*Click here to go to the home page for The Diocese of Alabama's Task for the Stewardship of Creation. Particularly look at the Spiritual Resources, Educational Materials and Links.

*On the website of the Episcopal Ecological Network is a page of links and contacts for Diocesan and Parish Environmental Stewardship Groups all over the Episcopal Church. The EpEN website also has great liturgical resources, and lots of other great stuff.

*The Diocese of Arizona's Nature and Spirituality program has a document of Green Stewardship Suggestions and a form to figure out your Family Carbon Footprint.

*The Regeneration Project is an interfaith ministry devoted to deepening the connection between ecology and faith. One of their primary campaigns is Interfaith Power and Light, which has mobilized a religious response to global warming in 30 states.

*The Diocese of Southern Ohio launched a campaign to replace all incandescent bulbs in all 95 churches throughout the Diocese with compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs), that use 75% less electricity and last 10 times longer than incandescent bulbs. Read about it here.

And this is just a few. Add your own as you find them!

Try it out

Hi everyone,
let's see if this time it will work. Could you leave random comments to try the blog?
Thanks!

Welcome Mary, Kay, Barbi, Kelly, Meredith, Sandy and Michael!

St. Louis... we have a blog, so let's see how this will work for us.
First of all, thank you to those who were able to make it to Grace today. Kay, we pray for your speedy recovery! We would love to know more about your internal poll of the youth regarding climate change. Do you have notes for that?

Just checking if you get this.

Story of stuff link - Just checking if this works