Welcome!

We are so glad you’ve found your way to this Energize Acton website! Here, you’ll discover a trove of tools and resources to motivate and support everyone in Acton to address our Climate Emergency by reducing greenhouse gas emissions (and achieving other, related goals). You can take action at home, at work, and in daily life — along with your family, neighbors, and Acton friends — to prepare for a changing climate and help reduce climate impacts.

Sign me up!

If you’re ready to get started with Energize Acton, just CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP and create your account (aka profile). If you want to know more first, read on.

How it all works & why to sign up

The goal of the Energize Acton website is to accelerate progress toward the “Net Zero Emissions by 2030” goal of Acton’s 2020 Declaration of a Climate Emergency (see the declaration here). The Actions on this site are designed to address the Climate Emergency both individually and collectively, and to include something for everyone, from small Actions to large ones.

This Energize Acton platform is also designed to capture nearly all the Actions taken in our community and, whenever possible, to quantify the carbon savings from them. Energize Acton is not just about individuals reducing their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions — important as that is. It is fundamentally about working together to speed our progress on emissions reductions and creating, as the Coalition tagline states, “A Better Future Starting Now.”

Using Energize Acton has multiple positive effects: (1) it creates momentum for climate action; (2) it helps users focus on significant climate actions, and understand the impacts they can have; (3) it allows the Town of Acton and the Acton Climate Coalition to have quantitative data on town-wide progress in reducing GHGs; and (4) it helps identify potential gaps in local climate mobilization efforts, primarily through the Testimonials that users provide.

Creating your own Energize Acton account allows you to:

• Record Actions you may already have taken. Maybe you already drive an EV (electric vehicle), or are already enrolled in Acton Power Choice GREEN. Good for you! Click on “Done” for any Actions you’ve already completed.
• Review other Actions that interest you. You can explore each through the Description, Steps to Take, and/or Deep Dive tabs on the Action page. Create your own “To Do” list for Actions you want and plan to take. Click on the To Do button for each specific Action you want to put on that list.
• Check your personal, cumulative impact score for Actions you’ve done by clicking on the circle with your initials at the top right of any page, and selecting “My Profile.”
• Have your impacts counted toward our collective goal; every action you mark as “Done” counts!
• Share the impacts of what you've done; click on the “Done” button for Actions you have taken to see the impacts (calculated via our peer-reviewed carbon calculator).
• Share your experience with Actions to help educate and motivate your neighbors: write a Testimonial! Click on “Testimonials” on the specific Action page and tell your story. 
• Join a team to boost the fun; have friendly competitions with other teams! When you join (or create; see next item) a team, your score will get added to that of your team.
• Create your very own team! Any group can be a team: your cricket team, your congregation, your street or neighborhood, your class at school, etc. (For now, this must be done on a computer rather than a mobile phone.)

NOTE: If you’re not quite ready to sign up — no worries! You can still see all the actions, events, testimonials, and collective impact. Nothing is “hidden” from visitors to the site.

Who are we / what’s our story?

Energize Acton is a collaboration between the Acton Climate Coalition (the Coalition) and the Town of Acton Sustainability Office. It is part of a broad mobilization effort to “bring net Town-wide carbon emissions to zero as quickly as possible, with a target date of 2030.” This target was established by the Climate Emergency Declaration passed at the September 2020 Acton Town Meeting, which specifically calls on “Town government and staff, and all Acton civic groups, businesses, and residents to commit to a climate mobilization effort.”

The Acton Climate Coalition formed in early 2020 with the intent to act more urgently on climate threats. It represents 38 coalition members in Acton, including civic and environmental organizations, businesses, individuals, and elected officials.

In 2020, the Coalition introduced the Climate Emergency Declaration with the following message: “In our community, nation, and world we are navigating profound repercussions from multiple crises: a viral pandemic and its economic impacts; a reckoning with our nation’s racist history and present; and our Climate Emergency. All are intertwined; all rest on failures to act with resolute and moral urgency. In facing these monumental inequities and threats, we must recommit ourselves to the vigilance, compassionate care, and imperative action their solutions demand. Those solutions offer the promise of a vastly safer, more just, and sustainable world.”

Goals for 2025

In pursuit of the 2030 net zero emissions target set out in Acton’s Declaration of a Climate Emergency, our Energize Acton goals will increase each year. 

Our goals for 2025 are:

• 175 Acton users setting up accounts: from 225 through last year to 400 by year-end
• 700 households opting up to Acton Power Choice GREEN: from 324 through last year to 1,024 by year-end
  
• 600 EV (electric vehicle) purchases or leases: from 694 through last year to 1294 by year-end
• 130 installations of heat pump technology for heating and cooling: from 138 through last year to 268 by year-end