Community Resilience Priorities
Community resilience priorities are actionable steps that were developed as part of the MVP 2.0 Planning Grant process. They are a result of dedicated community engagement, reflection on the evolving nature of community needs, and input from Environmental Justice and priority populations.
| Priorities | Potential Actions | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Priority 1: Enhance food system resilience by improving access to diverse food sources, supporting local food production, and addressing climate-related disruptions to food availability. | 
| Potential Actions: Workshops on climate-resilient gardening & shifts in food production, explore alternative food distribution sites to reduce reliance on the car-dependent rt 20 grocery stores. | |
| Priority 2: Reduce flood risk and improve water quality through regional watershed management, enhanced stormwater and water conservation policies, and incentive programs. | 
| Potential Actions: Develop regional strategies, establish stormwater utility/enterprise fund or surcharge for new construction; subsidized programs to streamline permitting & provide backflow preventers in flood-prone areas. | |
| Priority 3: Strengthen community connections and improve communication by leveraging existing community networks, trusted messengers, and events to share resources and information. Focus on outreach to priority populations such as older adults and low-income renters. | 
| Potential Actions: To be determined. | |
| Priority 4: Protect critical transportation routes to schools and essential workplaces through targeted flood resilience projects, prioritizing improved infrastructure along flood-prone corridors to ensure all-weather access for educators, care workers, and students. | 
| Potential Actions: Upgrade culverts, implementing green infrastructure solutions, and regularly maintaining existing drainage systems. | |
| Priority 5: Expand and maintain a safe, all-season active transportation network that connects neighborhoods, train stations, and recreational paths, promoting awareness of routes and resources to reduce reliance on personal vehicles. | 
| Potential Actions: To be determined. | |
| Priority 6: Support residents in making climate-resilient and energy-efficient improvements to their homes, providing resources and assistance in navigating home improvements for flooding resilience, climate control, and energy efficiency. | 
| Potential Actions: Develop a home retrofit program for flood & heat resilience, create financial assistance programs for climate-related home improvements, and provide information on flood insurance options. | |
| Priority 7: Develop strategies with primary care providers, home health programs, and utility partners to reduce health risks for homebound individuals or those with electricity-dependent medical devices. | 
| Potential Actions: To be determined. | |
| Priority 8: Leverage existing community networks, like the schools and library, and trusted messengers, such as the Senior Center and Sudbury Housing Authority staff, to do targeted outreach to priority populations such as renters and older adults around climate emergencies and resilience resources. | 
| Potential Actions: To be determined. | |
| Priority 9: Incorporate climate-adaptive strategies into Sudbury's ongoing open space and recreation planning, enhancing flood management and ecosystem restoration objectives. | 
| Potential Actions: Climate-resilience check list for the upcoming OSRP update, partnering with community organizations to organize residents around invasives management, trail clearing, etc. | |
| Priority 10: Enhance community cooling and warming centers by ensuring they have reliable climate controls and backup power and expanding programming and hours to serve older adults, young children, and other priority populations. | 
| Potential Actions: Building splash pads, provide hot-weather programing at the libraries and senior center, partner with property managers with community rooms | |
MVP 2.0 Seed Project
MVP 2.0 communities receive $50,000 of guaranteed funding to advance their resilience priorities by completing a Seed Project in 9-10 months with no local match required.
Objective: The objective of Resilience Ready is to train a core team of residents to become Climate Resilience Coaches who will conduct climate resilience assessments on residential properties within Sudbury. The seed project aims to equip residents with the knowledge and tools to identify climate-related risks to residential properties, provide actionable recommendations to homeowners to improve their resilience to climate change, and foster community-wide awareness and preparedness for climate-related hazards.
Activities:
- Recruit a Core Team of diverse residents interested in becoming Climate Resilience Coaches.
- Hire a consultant with expertise in climate resilience to design and deliver a training program for the core team.
- Train the core team to use publicly available data (e.g., FEMA flood maps, local GIS tools) to identify risks.
- Provide the core team with a Climate Resilience Assessment Checklist to guide their site visits.
- Train the core team to synthesize pre-assessment and site visit findings into a concise report for homeowners. Provide templates and guidelines for report writing.
- Organize community workshops to introduce the program and recruit homeowners for assessments.
- Collect feedback from homeowners and the core team to assess the program’s effectiveness.
Action Grant Projects
The MVP Action Grant offers financial resources to communities that are seeking to advance priority climate adaptation actions to address climate change impacts resulting from extreme weather, sea level rise, inland and coastal flooding, severe heat, and other climate impacts. Find more details on completed projects here.
- Locally Grown Sudbury FY25 - Locally Grown Sudbury is an ongoing project that intends to improve the climate resilience, food security, and health equity of Sudbury's residents. This project will promote eating locally grown foods by hosting two (2) Sudbury Grown Fairs, and developing a Farmers Market and Food Security Action Plan to strategize holding similar events consistently in the future. To ensure that these nutritious foods are as accessible as possible, this project also aims to provide coupons to climate vulnerable households so that products sold at the fairs may be acquired at a free or reduced rate. Additionally, this project proposes to implement a Climate Resilient Food Security Engagement Series in order to support local farms, educate the public on the overlap of climate change and food access, and provide tools and resources for residents to become more climate resilient and sustainable in their homes.