Climate action planning at Historic New England’s Casey Farm

The nation’s oldest and largest regional heritage organization approached climate action planning in three areas: mitigation, resilience, and climate justice.

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Historic New England is the nation’s oldest and largest regional heritage organization. It engages diverse audiences in developing a deeper understanding and enjoyment of New England home life by being the national leader in collecting, preserving, and using significant buildings, landscapes, archives, stories, and objects from the past to today. In 2023, after a year-long staff-driven planning process, Historic New England’s board of trustees recognized the need for climate action planning and took on a call to action through the adoption of an official statement about climate change and identified four goals for the institution to strive toward:

  1. Enacting operational shifts that integrate climate action into the day-to-day operations of Historic New England
  2. Achieving carbon neutrality for all Historic New England sites by 2050, continuously evaluating progress, and adjusting actions to achieve success 
  3. Managing Historic New England properties to meet high preservation standards but also adapting those standards to ensure resilience in the face of weather extremes and sea level rise
  4. Engaging a broad and inclusive public through robust partnerships, programs, and activities that advance climate justice for all

Among its holdings, Historic New England manages 41 historic properties open to the public in five New England states. Casey Farm, in Saunderstown, Rhode Island, seemed like a natural fit to serve as a Historic New England pilot site in undergoing a climate action planning process. Located by the Narragansett Bay on the ancestral homeland of the Narragansett People, Casey Farm once produced food for local and coastal markets and was one of many plantations tied to slavery.

Today, farmers raise organically grown produce for a community-supported agriculture (CSA) program and the seasonal Casey Farm Market. With a wide range of farm-based education programs, farm animals, a cemetery, and a farmhouse museum, this working farm is among the most dynamic of the HNE portfolio of properties. Weaving together the concepts of historic preservation with the modern realities and understanding of climate change mitigation, resilience, and climate justice was a critical component of a climate action planning process that brought together Historic New England staff, volunteers, and members of the community to shape Casey Farm’s climate goals.

Baselining for emissions, operations, and programming

GreenerU spent four months working with Historic New England staff, both those with regional administration responsibilities and those focused specifically on Casey Farm, to create a comprehensive understanding of the current state of sustainability. This process assessed the state of engagement and outreach; operations; Scopes 1, 2, and 3 greenhouse gas emissions; and climate resilience.

If you are looking for a collaborative climate action baselining and planning process unique to your institution, reach out and talk to us!

Part of this process was a stakeholder engagement survey provided to farmer’s market attendees to assess commuter habits and attitudes toward sustainability at Casey Farm. In addition, GreenerU completed a building decarbonization assessment with recommendations for energy conservation measures. All of this data was presented at a webinar on September 20, 2023, which kicked off the first of two facilitated stakeholder meetings to develop a set of goals.

A launch and a zenith

Two stakeholder meetings were held in the fall of 2023 to gather feedback on the baseline data, formulate draft goals, and make revisions, as well as to develop ideas for strategies and action items underneath each goal. Invited stakeholders were divided into three subgroups that aligned with Historic New England’s overarching sustainability categories: mitigation, resilience, and climate justice.

The first stakeholder meeting (the launch) was held in October 2023 at the Saunderstown Yacht Club, a local organization that leases a small portion of Casey Farm. During this meeting, stakeholders created a shared understanding of Casey Farm’s baseline, established a strategic direction for the Farm’s climate action goals, and formulated a set of ideas for action. A core group of Historic New England staff—Sustainability Coordinator Joie Grandbois, Property Care Team Leader Ben Haavik, and Casey Farm Site Manager Jane Hennedy, along with GreenerU staff—reviewed the outcomes of this meeting and began to develop goal language.

At the second stakeholder meeting (originally to be called the summit, but renamed the zenith because Historic New England hosts a regional conference every year called the Summit), held in November 2023 at the Contemporary Theater Company in South Kingstown, goals were presented in the form of a “gallery tour” with assignments of individual SMARTIE—strategic, measurable, achievable, realistic, time-bound, inclusive, and equitable—criteria. The meeting resulted in multiple revisions and, ultimately a strong set of goals for on-site emissions, waste, and water use reduction; alternative transportation; increased accessibility; and farming- and food-related programming to reach more diverse communities. Casey Farm’s final climate action plan can be read here.

Climate action planning for nonprofits

GreenerU devised a modified approach to climate action planning for Casey Farm, a nonprofit organization without the same broad base of stakeholder types as a college or even an independent K12 school. Our usual process relies upon two to four focus area working groups (a.k.a. subcommittees) that each undergo separate facilitated meetings to create goals, strategies, action items, and resource estimates for implementation. With a smaller site staff and smaller overall footprint, however, it made more sense for a core team to hammer out plan minutiae rather than convening multiple individual working groups.

Thus, behind the scenes, GreenerU worked with Haavik, Grandbois, and Hennedy (and later additional Historic New England staff members) to assess strategy language and determine what action items were realistic to implement. This process also included identifying who would lead which efforts, when an effort would take place (year and quarter), and what funding, if any, was necessary to implement the plan. Armed with this detailed version of the plan, Casey Farm is marching forward with its tasks to create a more resilient, decarbonized, and inclusive community for the residents of southern Rhode Island.

Looking ahead

Casey Farm was just the start. In 2024, Historic New England launched a new climate action planning process with a very different property: Pierce House in Dorchester, Massachusetts. This property is open to the public for tours four times a year and hosts programming on colonial life for elementary school children. At both Casey Farm and Pierce House, GreenerU continues to work with Historic New England to investigate historically and architecturally appropriate ways to offer energy-efficient decarbonization solutions for these structures to ensure their continued operations well into the future.

New England is home to some of the oldest architecture in the nation. Keep these treasures alive and well through careful consideration of climate impacts on historic structures. If you’d like to explore whether a climate action planning process and/or energy-efficiency engineering study is right for your historic property, contact us today.


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