Dynamic integration
 

What’s new with EDA? Quite a lot.
We're organizing around regional legislation for the first time.
 

EDA began in 2017 as a loose confederation of sub-groups that worked independently with little interaction. As these small teams matured, we needed a way of coordinating them to work together. That's why we created EDA's Integrative Management Planning and Coordinating Team (IMPACT). This strategic planning team was ratified by EDA members on November 1, 2020.
 

2022 is the year that IMPACT's integration plan will go into operation. Our Action Council teams no longer work in isolation. One impetus for this united front is our State Legislation team. Starting this year, EDA’s Advocacy, Research and Education teams will take their direction from the bills that are earmarked by our State Legislation group. This is now the driving force in EDA.
 

One of the benefits of this process is that EDA will be on top of the latest legislation, which will be showcased on our website and updated on a regular basis. As this catches on with the public, we expect more and more people to follow the State Legislative Tracker on our website. 
 

The identification of bills for advocacy will enable EDA’s business team to find partners and clients in US States who have an interest in legislation for equitable and sustainable practices. We had been unable to work this way in the past. Now, with the new legislative database, we are no longer downstream from the legislative action: we can find key legislation at its source.
 

Another implication of our legislation-driven activity is that we are now able to develop an annual plan based on the significant bills that EDA is advocating. The process is generating a yearly cycle of programmatic and business activities for the entire organization.

This dynamic integration also allows us to schedule all of our events more effectively, which will influence the content of our social media and public presentations. We're currently developing an illustrated chart of our annual business cycle, which you will be seeing in an upcoming newsletter and on our website.

State Legislation steps forward

In the spring of last year, EDA’s State Legislation group met to select initial legislation that would be populated on our new EDA website. It was a very successful experience for everyone.

On January 14, EDA’s State Legislation subgroups began to meet again. There are three teams that search for pending legislation dealing with three areas that are EDA's focus: 

• Green team for food
• Blue team for water
• Gold team for energy

Some of our challenges

Populating our State legislative database is more challenging this year. The timetable is dictated by the legislatures that we track. A complicating factor is that US states do not have uniform legislative seasons. They start on different dates and may end their sessions as early as March or as late December.

So our three teams have developed a schedule that will optimize the timing of our tracking and supporting key pieces of legislation. Under the direction of Grant Grover, these teams will be reviewing bills in two stages: 

Phase 1 - January & February - 22 states that go out of session early  

Phase 2 - Spring - the remaining states that go out of session later

It’s not too late to join this fascinating work. The more people we have researching various state’s legislation, the quicker we can complete the task. If you’d like to help, please contact Grant Grover at grant.grover@sustaineda.org

Partnerships and Advocacy

As EDA begins this new phase of integration, we should emphasize that advocacy remains EDA's core mission. Lobbying elected officials for legislative action is still our primary focus.

What's changed is the way in which our new website and the State Legislative teams have transformed EDA's approach to partnerships and advocacy.

These capacities will now enable us to find and engage with anchor partners in different regional areas. In turn, we'll be able to fortify the outreach activities of our partners by holding advocacy training events, based on key legislation, in each partner’s own State.

Working with local partners will enable us to have many more local constituents involved in EDA's advocacy efforts. We're launching this campaign for new partners in February.

As a result of EDA's active engagement with these partnering organizations, we'll be expanding our coverage of local and regional issues, as well as our advocacy for specific bills that support these issues.

Information on these new activities will be discussed in this newsletter and in our public events. Watch this space.

EDA Audit for 2021
 

EDA is undergoing its annual audit. Dorothy Myers and John Lowe are now examining EDA’s financial statements from 2021 and offering recommendations for improving our operations.

This audit by Dorothy and John is independent of the EDA Board of Directors and our IMPACT business group. 

The results of this audit will be reflected in the Financial Documents section of our 2021 Annual Report. An analysis of EDA’s work during the past year and a message from President David Cunningham and Managing Director James Quilligan will also be included in this yearly summary to our members and public.

The 2021 annual report will be available in March on our website.

 

We hope you're all well and thriving in this crazy time! We wanted to take this opportunity to thank all of you who have joined one or more of our Action Council Teams. The Chairs of the teams are all very grateful for your help. There's a lot of work to be done.  

Over the next few months, the State Legislation Team will be reviewing legislation in all 50 states and selecting the most appropriate bills to support our efforts toward greater equitability and sustainability in food, water, and energy. 

Likewise, the Advocacy Team is preparing training for potential local partners in support of these legislative efforts.  

Our Research Team is defining, standardizing and clarifying all of the sources of our data and double-checking the variables and formulas that we use, so that moving forward we'll have a solid foundation and reference for our work.  

The Education Team is preparing support materials for our advocacy partners. Education is also updating all the seminars that we have presented to the membership in the past.

If any of these teams or tasks strike you as interesting, please contact the Action Council Chairs and they will get you engaged and involved. (See team contact information at the bottom of the newsletter.)

How can we serve you better?
As your Trustees, we represent the interests of the entire EDA membership. Would you like to have a few more town hall meetings to discuss EDA activities, plans, and your ideas? This can easily be arranged. If there are other ways we can be of service to you, please let us know. You can contact your trustees through:  terry.blatt@sustaineda.org

Your At-Large Trustees,
Terry Blatt, James Kolb, Geoff Schaber

A message from Stephanie Bell  
EDA's Social Media Officer
 

This month I thought I’d focus on Facebook, since it’s the most popular social media platform among our members. 

Make sure you see all of EDA’s posts by updating your settings 

If you’ve already ‘Liked’ our Facebook page, you’ll be following us and in theory, that means you should see all of our posts. 

But Facebook is run by algorithms and that means you don’t necessarily get posts in chronological order. Facebook prefers to push what it thinks are the most popular posts, so sometimes even though you’ve ‘Liked’ EDA’s page, you may not automatically see our posts. 

Here’s how to fix that problem

1)  Open up Facebook and navigate to EDA’s page

Once you’re there, you'll see the row of dots on the right, just below the banner picture (see first arrow) 

2)  Next, click on Follow settings.

 

Once you’ve clicked "Follow settings", you’ll see the menu above

From there, you can choose which settings you’d like to change. The arrow is pointing to Posts as these are the ones you’ll want to make sure you’re following first. You can follow the same process for the other menu items below if you want to.