About Energize Ashland

Welcome!

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

Sign me up!

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

How it all works & Why sign up?

Energize Ashland is fundamentally about all of us working together to address our climate emergency and accelerate progress toward the Net Zero Resolution passed at Ashland’s Town Meeting in the fall of 2020. As we share our experiences we learn from each other how easy it is to make small changes in our daily lives that, over time, make a positive impact. This website gives us a place to record the positive climate Actions that friends and neighbors are taking or have already taken. Where possible, it quantifies those carbon savings and reflects it as quantitative data on our town-wide progress.It’s also a resource to learn about fun, engaging educational programs and special events that inspire action to reduce climate change.

A Deeper Look… Creating your own Energize Ashland account lets you:

• Record Actions you’ve already taken. Maybe you already drive an EV (electric vehicle), or are already enrolled in Ashland’s “Aggregated Energy Choice”. Good for you! Click on “Done” for Actions you’ve already completed. 

• Review other Actions that may interest you. You can explore each through the Description, Steps to Take, and/or Deep Dive tabs on the Action page. Create your own list of Actions you want to take by clicking the “To Do” button for each one.

• See your personal, cumulative impact score for completed Actions by clicking on the circle with your initials at the top right of any page, and selecting “My Profile”.

• See the impact of your completed Actions - clicking on the “Done” button automatically adds your impact contribution to Ashland’s total (calculated via our peer-reviewed carbon calculator).

• Share your experience to help educate and motivate your neighbors: write a Testimonial! Click the “Testimonials” button 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, your score gets added automatically to your team.

• Create your own team! Any group can be a team: your soccer team, your church, your street or neighborhood, your class at school, etc.

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.

What’s our story?

“Energize Ashland” started last summer when a small group of Ashland residents who are very concerned about climate change met to explore what we could do about it. In early meetings we started to learn from each other how easy it was to make small changes in our daily lives that, over time, make a positive impact.

Sensing there were many others in town who shared our concerns and from whom we could learn, we still had the question, “How do we all connect with each other?” With everyone’s busy lives, how could we all easily, efficiently collaborate to share, learn, discuss and celebrate all the small wins which add up to significant positive differences?

We discovered other towns were addressing these same issues in collaboration with the statewide organization MassEnergize. We wanted to motivate and inspire fellow Ashland residents to take actions like those we saw in those towns.

Starting with a template developed by Mass Energize, we modified it to be Ashland-specific and created EnergizeAshland.org. Twenty-three other Massachusetts towns have created similar programs. 

The Energize Ashland team is collaborating with the Ashland Sustainability Committee and the Town of Ashland Sustainability Manager as part of a broad mobilization to “bring net Town-wide carbon emissions to zero as quickly as possible, with a target date of 2040”. 

Energize Ashland’s Mission Statement

Energize Ashland is an all-volunteer group dedicated to helping our neighbors and local businesses take steps in their homes, at work, and in their daily lives to address the climate emergency. Our ultimate goal is that all Ashland households are capable, empowered, and determined to take actions to slow climate change.

Why? We face a climate emergency that cries out for action from every member of our community - people of all ages and income levels, businesses, houses of worship, schools, municipal government, nonprofits and grassroots organizations - to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, improve local resilience, build real community, and adapt to a changing, unstable climate. 

Goals for 2024

In support and pursuit of Ashland’s 2040 Net Zero Emissions target, Energize Ashland goals will increase each year. Our 2024 goals are 100 Ashland users setting up accounts: from 444 through April 2024 to 545 by year-end