The areas of impact that the Institute for Sustainable Communities (ISC) focuses on are factories, community resilience, and cities. This website shares international best practices and experience, providing technical expertise and training, and building the capacity of local organizations.

ISC demonstrates to factories that environment, health, and safety improvements can go hand-in-hand with improved competitiveness and profitability. ISC’s insight helps businesses in coordination with the global and local brands they supply, to adopt climate-smart and socially compliant technologies and practices that result in greener, safer production.

ISC connects factories with their surrounding communities, which helps tackle resource issues of common concern (such as water management). These strengthened partnerships lead to greater community and supply chain resilience. ISC helps institutions and leaders in underserved communities by providing them with knowledge, strategic funding, and tools to accelerate their resilience initiatives. ISC is finding new ways to apply technologies like green infrastructure, solar, and living shorelines to bolster social, economic, and environmental resilience.

ISC works to foster connections to help communities tackle immediate economic, social, or environmental problems between neighbors and bridges long-standing social divides. ISC is working with local leaders to customize and integrate best practices that feature data-driven and locally relevant solutions such as green building, renewable energy use, and low-carbon transportation.

ISC introduces its partners to cutting-edge action and resources online via their knowledge center, in-person through workshops, and on a day-to-day basis in direct neighborhood and city technical assistance engagements. Cities can be laboratories for change. ISC seeks to break down silos, leading to local solutions that directly address systemic inequities and hold cross-cutting benefits.

ISC works to find or create the financing vehicles and public-private partnerships that metro-regions need to implement sustainability solutions.

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