Creation Care Alliance of Western North Carolina

Join the 21-Day Eco-Challenge- CCA Registration is open.

In his book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, Chip Heath suggests that leaders who are seeking organizational change may slip into ideas about others like “Why are these people acting so badly? They must be bad people.” Instead, he suggests that we lead by setting up situations that bring out the good in people, including ourselves. This holds true for families, churches, faith communities, neighborhoods, and individuals.

Both individual and collective changes are often difficult. Sometimes a brief restart or behavioral experiment can support a new habit. This is one reason why the Creation Care Alliance is inviting all and any faith communities and individuals to participate in the 21-Day Eco-Challenge October 3-24, 2018.

The EcoChallenge is a 21-day sustainability engagement program. Individuals and faith communities track and share their creation care progress online in a robust platform and earn points for taking action. The combination of collective action, camaraderie, and friendly competition make change a little easier — and a lot more fun. The EcoChallenge is free and open to the public.

EcoChallenge provides tools and inspiration to turn intention into action and gives participants a fun and social way to think about and act on proven solutions that make a difference for you, your community, and the planet. Over 100 actions within nine Challenge categories provide participants with diverse options to take action. Challenge categories include waste, food, health, transportation, energy, community, nature, water, simplicity and “create your own”.

You can participate in two ways.

1. You can join the Creation Care Alliance Team– Scott Hardin-Nieri is the current team Captain and can answer questions you might have.  scott@creationcarealliance.org

2. Register as a congregational or organizational team (it only takes one person to form a team)

If you are joining the October Eco-Challenge as a team, please consider naming the organization Creation Care Alliance of Western North Carolina/Mountaintrue with your congregational team name. This will help us identify congregations that are connected to our network while still highlighting your congregational team name. 

An example would be: Organization: Creation Care Alliance of Western North Carolina Team Name: First Christian Church, Black Mountain.

If you wish, you can actually have multiple teams within the same congregation such as “First Presbyterian Youth” and “First Presbyterian Elders”.

We hope to have several CCA faith community teams across Western North Carolina participate and feel like we can learn together and generate more support if we have a coordinated effort. 

Last year during the Global Project Drawdown Eco-Challenge the Asheville High School Team ranked #1 of 750 teams. 

You can get a sense of the format and impact here from the CCA team that participated last spring.

Take a look at our COLLECTIVE IMPACT- Small actions add up to big impact — this is what happens when thousands of actions are taken together.

Up to 150,402 POUNDS OF CO2 HAVE BEEN SAVED
UP TO 56,169 GALLONS OF WATER HAVE BEEN SAVED
UP TO183,396 MINUTES SPENT LEARNING
UP TO 21,165 MEATLESS OR VEGAN MEALS CONSUMED
UP TO 18,138 MILES TRAVELLED BY CARPOOL
UP TO 4,793 LOCALLY SOURCED MEALS CONSUMED
UP TO 2,677 LIGHTBULBS REPLACED
UP TO 200 HOURS VOLUNTEERED
UP TO 2,037 PUBLIC OFFICIALS OR LEADERS CONTACTED
UP TO 3,706 CONVERSATIONS WITH PEOPLE
UP TO 493 PEOPLE HELPED
UP TO 716 DOCUMENTARIES WATCHED
UP TO 7,655 MILES TRAVELLED BY BIKE
UP TO 6,689 ZERO-WASTE MEALS CONSUMED
UP TO 35,334 MILES TRAVELLED BY BUS