Frogtown Green grows trees, vegetables, and energy savings

The Carnival is a festival and resource fair put on by volunteer-powered environmental organization Frogtown Green. Each year’s carnival is a little different. The 2024 carnival, which attracted around 350 attendees, was organized by topic area: ecology, waste, food, and energy each had a dedicated “realm” complete with games, information, and resources from a wide variety of community organizations. The “energy realm,” which featured resources such as Clean Energy Resource Teams’ (CERTs) Home Energy Guides and take-home goodies like efficient lightbulbs, was a required stop on participants’ journeys to fill out a full carnival bingo. 

The carnival was not the only chance Frogtown residents had to learn about clean and efficient energy in 2024. Supported by a CERTs Seed Grant, Frogtown Green also wrote articles and created inserts for the neighborhood newspaper, distributed flyers to every Frogtown residence, and hosted a neighborhood dinner at the local rec center featuring presentations on energy efficiency, community solar, and other ways to save energy and money. 

Frogtown Green didn’t always talk about energy. When the organization was founded in 2009, Frogtown had less green space and lower tree canopy cover than almost anywhere else in the city, and Frogtown Green meant to change that. They’ve since succeeded in planting thousands of square feet of gardens, pollinator-friendly native plants, and climate-resilient trees. As they grew, they realized that to truly serve their neighborhood, they had to go beyond traditional “greening” efforts.

In conversations with her neighbors, Ohmans says, people weren’t worried about pollinator health or carbon-free electricity — they were worried about making ends meet, and having a secure, healthy, affordable place to live.

Frogtown Green began to broaden its work, exploring new areas of sustainability and focusing on projects that can help people pay the bills and make them feel safer and more comfortable in their homes and their neighborhood.

When they connected with CERTs, they realized home energy education was a great match for those priorities. With CERTs support and seed grant funds, they focused on free or low-cost solutions that could directly benefit residents. This included promoting programs like community solar, tree-planting, and weatherization, all of which can decrease energy bills and often improve comfort at home. 

Even though Frogtown Green’s target audience is, by definition, their neighbors, reaching new people can still be a challenge. In an age where there is no universal, trusted source of information, Frogtown Green uses a combination of strategies to share their message, from local print media to door-to-door outreach.

In addition, Frogtown is linguistically diverse: nearly a quarter of residents lack English fluency. Frogtown Green made use of CERTs’ translated Home Energy Guides in Spanish, Somali, and Hmong, helping them to reach residents they don’t usually have the funds or capacity to translate for. It’s a good start, and they’d like to do more. There’s a lot of interpretation that’s needed, says Ohmans, to overcome both a lack of literacy and the technical nature of a lot of energy-related information.

To address these obstacles, Frogtown Green will have to continue to find new, creative ways to meet their neighbors where they’re at. In the meantime, though, their tried-and-true methods aren’t going anywhere — planning is already underway for the 2025 Climate Carnival. The basic philosophy behind the carnival, Ohmans says, is to “not scare people with the realities of [climate change], which are already being felt.”