Sustainable Community Development

Communities face enormous challenges as their social, economic, and environmental resources are depleted and destroyed. Sustainable development represents a holistic way to achieve recovery and enhance the quality of life for everyone in these communities by developing local assets to revitalize economies, limiting waste and pollution, improving the status of disadvantaged people, conserving natural resources, and promoting cooperation and efficiency.

In addressing issues important to achieving sustainable communities, Five E's Unlimited works with its clients to facilitate public understanding of how one practice affects another, and how one resource affects another, by guiding adoption of integrative frameworks and Strategic Planning efforts that equally consider social, economic, and ecologic concerns. The intent is to encourage looking beyond solving problems one at a time, to envision the development of communities and systems that prevent problems from occurring.

In this process of problem-solving, Five E's encourages groups and organizations to identify and discuss their particular Community Needs that they believe will improve human well-being without degrading environmental health. Check out the Community Needs identified by others we have worked with. Checkout the 10 years of experience we have in Sustainable Community Design, working with communities to build their capacity toward the development of sustainable action strategies.

We Can Assist You To:

• facilitate and expand access to knowledge, better communicating scientific and technical results;
• obtain technical training in information management technology;
• decode, de-mystify, and put into layman's terms required information about how to achieve sustainable development;
• strengthen the community capacity to address sustainability issues by encouraging public awareness and grassroots activities; and
• attract a "civic critical mass" of community participation, because without maximum stakeholder involvement there is usually not sufficient public buy-in and commitment to sustain projects.

When we take on a client project, Five E's role is to fit into the existing network of client relationships and bring to this network an integrative perspective. The goal of Five E's assistance in this regard is not to change the client's objectives, but to understand those objectives so that programs can be developed to best aid the client in achieving their self-defined ambitions.

Examples of Five E's assistance to groups in Building Sustainable Communities includes work in the following areas.

• Development of projects in public learning, continuing awareness, and other community capacity-building activities to build linkages among environmental, economic, social, & cultural concerns.
• Training programs to encourage community partners to collectively explore the most effective means of achieving sustainable development, that focus concurrently on humanity, nature, and technology.
• Work with governments, community interest groups, and business to seek common ground and resolve conflicts by articulating and clarifying crucial controversies and fostering community decision-making and problem-solving strategies, supported by our Firm's ever-increasing experience in sustainable development.
• Guidance to organization networking through assistance in the building of internet web sites and training in information management technology.
• Facilitation to neighborhood organizations in adopting programs of environmentally sustainable lifestyles, where households partner in neighborhood and city-wide environmental stewardship projects.
• Assistance in the community identification of indicators & benchmarks to measure progress toward sustainability.
• Guidance nationally and internationally to assist communities in development, testing, and application of ecologically sustainable methods for improving living standards in valuable natural resource areas.