Increasing Community Resilience for Climate-Related Events Through Green Infrastructure

About This Investment

Green infrastructure—parks, street trees, grass and shrubs on rooftops, and any intentional city feature that uses vegetation—has many benefits. It reduces utility bills, improves property values, improves air quality, reduces flooding and heat islands, improves water quality, and promotes community resilience in the face of extreme weather and climate change. Yet communities with low incomes have often not enjoyed this kind of infrastructure investment or had a voice in its design. And implementation of green infrastructure can pay dividends in health outcomes, community beautification, and jobs.   

A $5 million program-related co-investment with the Kresge Foundation and Spring Point Partners to Greenprint Partners is helping build green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) in communities that are likely to be acutely impacted by the effects of climate-related events; these communities are disproportionately communities of color and communities with low incomes.  

Why It Was Needed

Historically, communities have used “gray” infrastructure—systems of gutters, pipes, and tunnels—to move stormwater away from residential areas to treatment plants or straight to local water bodies. Yet, gray infrastructure is aging and costly, and its limited capacity to manage larger volumes of stormwater has been exposed by climate change and extreme weather events. 

Outdated water infrastructure and changing weather patterns mean more flooding and water pollution, which occur when untreated and unfiltered stormwater and wastewater exceed the capacity of the existing infrastructure and flow into nearby bodies of water.

Cities are increasingly recognizing the benefits of implementing GSI, and its potential market is large: nearly 800 cities in the U.S. still have combined stormwater and water overflow systems that pollute waterways and threaten drinking water quality when large storms cause an outflow of sewage, industrial waste, and other pollutants into the waterways. Approximately 40 cities have had or currently have pollution at levels considered so high that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Justice have issued consent decrees to mandate clean-up.

But cities face barriers to installing GSI in neighborhoods with lower incomes. GSI installation is a relatively new, somewhat undervalued concept, and a lack of technical knowledge required for building and maintaining it can slow the process down.

Many municipalities remain unfamiliar with how to adopt GSI due to lack of staff capacity and expertise, or access to funding, as well as the real and perceived challenges of organizing and installing GSI on plots of land that are typically smaller in communities with low incomes.   

How It Works

Greenprint Partners works with municipalities and engineering firms and facilitates community engagement to ensure its work is guided by what residents envision for their communities. This loan will provide upfront dollars needed to plan and prepare for new GSI projects, as well as fund Greenprint’s growth.  

About the Borrower

Greenprint Partners is a women-owned, Certified B Corporation that helps cities develop and finance community-GSI—working in partnership with community-based organizations and residents, with an exclusive focus on communities with low incomes and those that are susceptible to climate-related events.   

In the Spotlight

The Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District (MMSD) has an ambitious goal: to capture the first half-inch of rainfall in their service area with green infrastructure, representing about 740 million gallons of water! To make progress against this goal in an equitable way, MMSD partnered with Greenprint Partners to launch the Fresh Coast Green Communities Program, a $31M program to connect with communities to plan, build, and maintain multi-benefit green infrastructure on public and private property. Since program launch, Greenprint has secured commitments from more than 30 mission-aligned public and private landowners. The majority of projects are located in ZIP codes that score high on the CDC Social Vulnerability Index.