Commerce City, Colorado | Climate Action Grants Consultant

Climate Action Grants Consultant

Lotus, OSS, and Pinyon worked with the City of Commerce City (C3) to support their sustainability-focused grant writing projects. Lotus has worked with C3 in the past to create their Sustainability Action Plan and support their Environmental Policy Advisory Committee. The grant writing services were a rewarding extension of this multi-year partnership as we worked to fund their sustainability goals. We collaborated with the city’s grants coordinator to identify opportunities aligned with the city’s goals and drive applications to completion. Our team helped to coordinate stakeholders to create coalitions that will improve the competitiveness of each application. We also streamlined processes to expedite the grant writing and developed a prioritization methodology to identify strategies that will win funding. 

Our team worked with community partner, Black Parents United, to apply for $17 million for the EPA Community Change Grant. We also helped C3 to establish a relationship with the non-profit, Spirit of the Sun. Spirit of the Sun is an indigenous organization that works with disadvantaged communities in urban areas and on reservations to boost resilience. Lotus led the grant writing process for C3 and Spirit of Sun in pursuit of a $250,000 CDPHE Environmental Justice Grant. The project seeking funding (designed in large part by Lotus) is titled Project Grow! Commerce City. It is a targeted environmental health initiative aimed at restoring the environment in disadvantaged communities through a two-pronged approach to improving soil quality. The first approach will assess the quality of the soil in Commerce City’s public right of way. The second approach will provide access to viable soil to community members and equip them with permaculture knowledge to catalyze change across the city. The award is still pending.