A new nonprofit is giving local food bank Second Harvest of Coastal Georgia the opportunity to save some green while going green.
Called Sustainativity, the newly launched nonprofit plans to install energy-efficient lighting at Second Harvest’s administrative headquarters and warehouse on President Street, which will in turn save the food bank about $3,000 a year on its power bill.
Sustainativity is the brainchild of 36-year-old Tommy Linstroth, principal at green-building consultants Trident Sustainability Group and CEO of Green Badger, a new mobile app for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design documentation, better known as LEED.
He said he got the idea for Sustainativity after working and donating to local nonprofits over the years, and he wondered if there wasn’t a more direct way to combine philanthropy and sustainability — while cutting out all the administrative overhead.
“It’s a direct philanthropic investment in sustainability,” said Linstroth, who explained that 100 percent of funds will go toward environmentally friendly projects within the Savannah community.
“We’re trying to aggregate the funds to implement sustainability programs that will benefit the nonprofit as well as benefit the community and lessen everybody’s environmental impact,” he said.
As the first recipient, Second Harvest will have about 100 fixtures replaced with updated energy-efficient fluorescent tubes and LED lights, about 300 bulbs in all.
The project will cost about $10,000, but will result in the aforementioned energy savings of $3,000 a year, which will help Second Harvest feed more people.
“They’ll get an additional 15,000 meals out of this lighting retrofit and that’s a huge return for us,” said Linstroth. “It’s not just, ‘Oh, we’re saving a couple of kilowatts of energy,’ we’re directly contributing to 15,000 additional meals a year.”
Each of the bulbs that will be installed will be between 50-70 percent more efficient, Linstroth said.
He said they’re about a quarter of the way to their funding goal. With some grant applications and fundraising events planned for the spring, he hopes to complete the retrofit by this summer.
Eventually the group, which just appointed a board of directors, will also create an application process for other local nonprofits to submit their requests. He said the projects could range from community gardens to installing solar panels — it just depends on the organization.
He believes one of the reasons more nonprofits don’t implement sustainable practices is there just isn’t the funding for it.
“They don’t have excess capital, so if they’re raising money, it’s to do their mission, which is to feed more people or a capital project that had to be done. … It’s limited resources that every nonprofit and, frankly, everybody deals with,” said Linstroth.
The nonprofit’s name, Sustainativity, is a play on both “sustainability” and “creativity,” which Linstroth hopes will inspire nonprofits to think outside the box when it comes to fulfilling their mission while lessoning their overall environmental impact.
“There’s a lot of rhetoric out there about what sustainability is, and there’s a lot of misconceptions,” said Linstroth. “And we’re trying to show there are different ways of going about implementing a sustainability program.”
ON THE WEB
For more information on Sustainativity, go to www.sustainativity.org.