Progress Is All Around Us, If You Know Where to Look

This story on local action is part of The Solutions Effect, a monthly newsletter covering the best of solutions journalism in the sustainability and social impact space. If you aren't already getting this newsletter, you can sign up here.

A lot of Americans turned off the news after the country’s presidential election in November and haven’t turned it back on. The trend crosses party lines and extends to topics like the economy and climate change, but it is particularly prominent in political news, which seems to seep into every headline. 

The news is feeding information overload, fatigue, anxiety and frustration, exacerbating an already decade-long trend of avoidance connected to negative emotions. For some, turning off their notifications offers a bit of control amid the chaos. I don’t blame them. There are days I can’t bring myself to look at the news, too. It’s left me wondering what my place in this moment is as a solutions journalist, but it’s also reminded me that this is why I do what I do. 

When the problems feel like too much to bear, I find solace in the stories of those making progress. They push on regardless of whether the trending headlines show it. Individuals, communities, cities and states across the country are still acting on sustainability and social issues — and that’s worth reading about. If you’re also searching for those stories, read on. 

A Texas community bank is building affordable homes without federal help 

One of the oldest Hispanic-owned banks in the nation recently developed seven affordable homes for first-time homeowners, and more are on the way, journalist Oscar Perry Abello reported for Next City. The 105-year-old Texas National Bank made a community development subsidiary, allowing it to use its own money to invest in local projects. The process removes the layers of red tape that come with federal funding and slow progress.

The community bank funneled $400,000 of its own funds into the subsidiary to develop homes it can sell at below-market prices thanks to help from local business, contractors and organizations. Bank staff volunteer their time to run the program, identifying low-cost vacant lots, reaching out to local contractors who can offer their time, acquiring donated materials, and managing the developments through completion. Thanks to the low development costs, the bank sells completed homes at affordable prices for families earning anywhere from 50 to 80 percent of the local median income. 

Texas National Bank expects to sell six more homes by the end of the year. The process it used to do so, creating a subsidiary community development corporation, is something all banks can do. “That first hurdle is just what’s the right entity or right vehicle to make this possible,” Rey Garcia, the bank’s executive vice president, told Next City. Read more. 

The largest state-based green bank made its first investment in EV charging 

The NY Green Bank is the largest state-based green investment fund in the nation. Earlier this year, it signed off on a $60 million loan for public electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure, senior writer Tina Casey reported for TriplePundit. This is the first investment of its kind for the green bank, providing the Brooklyn-based EV startup Revel with enough funds to install 267 chargers across New York City. That’s triple the number Revel has installed so far. 

The effort builds on the bank’s decision to finance a project that added nearly 400 EVs to the city’s streets last year, improving rideshare access in underserved communities. NY Green Bank hopes its work will stimulate private investment in EVs and disadvantaged communities across the country. “The Revel transaction is an important and replicable precedent we expect will help accelerate investment in this fast-growing sector and expand access to EV charging,” Andrew Kessler, NY Green Bank president, said in a statement. Read more. 

Great Lakes region fisheries are taking advice from Iceland for a more sustainable industry 

The ever-popular fillet only makes up half of a fish’s weight. Scales, bones and even heads are left as waste that small family fisheries around the Great Lakes have to figure out how to dispose of. That waste often ends up as a costly addition to a landfill or turned into something like fertilizer, which generates no income, journalist Lydia Larsen reported for Reasons to be Cheerful. The intergovernmental organization Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Governors and Premiers wants to change that. It is working with fisheries to utilize all of the parts of a fish, build a more sustainable industry, and develop the region’s rural economies with help from experts who did the same in Iceland. 

Iceland introduced strict limits to protect its Atlantic cod fishery industry in the 1990s, greatly reducing the number of fish one fleet can catch. That meant businesses had to get creative, maximizing the value of a single fish. Now, fisheries in the country use about 90 percent of the fish they catch, selling byproducts like fish skin leather for shoes and collagen for cosmetics. 

The team in the Great Lakes wants to build out a similar array of products and eliminate landfilling. So far, about 90 percent of commercial fish production businesses in the region have signed on to find ways to use 100 percent of their fish by the end of this year. Read more. 

States are working together to cut fossil fuels from construction 

Since California adopted the first such policy in 2017, nine states have enacted Buy Clean laws designed to use public agencies’ purchasing power to incentivize heavy industries to decarbonize, journalist Maria Gallucci reported for Canary Media. In Buy Clean states, companies vying to construct public buildings and infrastructure must compete to have the lowest amount of carbon in their building materials, alongside offering a good price. That boosts demand for lower-carbon industrial products like steel, cement, asphalt and glass. Considering the carbon released from the materials we use to make buildings makes up about 11 percent of annual global emissions, this effort could drive large-scale change with significant impact. 

The nine states — California, Oregon, Colorado, Washington, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Minnesota and Massachusetts — are part of a larger coalition of states looking to adopt similar policies. When the Federal-State Buy Clean Partnership launched in 2023 to back these efforts, 13 states signed on to participate. That program was recently abandoned on the federal level, but state agencies are forging on without it. Most states are still in the early stages of this process, continuing to collaborate with the help of the U.S. Climate Alliance, a bipartisan coalition of two dozen governors. 

“Buy Clean is a great example of how states and other nonfederal actors can continue to press forward on climate action, regardless of what the federal government does,” Casey Katims, executive director of the alliance, told Canary Media. Read more.  

Progress persists outside of the U.S.

Let’s not forget that action happens outside of the U.S., too. Earlier this week, countries from across the globe came together to deposit over 14,000 seed samples from climate-hardy crops in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault to safeguard crop diversity for the future. 

After the largest U.S. banks fled the Net-Zero Banking Alliance earlier this year, London banking executives launched the Transition Finance Council to rally local companies and policymakers to fund decarbonization efforts in the city and abroad. 

Denmark just announced it’s on track to reach its 2030 goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 70 percent compared to 1990 levels. 

And yesterday, countries finally agreed on a plan to raise and distribute $200 billion annually for biodiversity conservation by 2030 at the continuation of the United Nations conference on biodiversity that initially ended without consensus last November. 

In short: Progress is all around us, even when it’s hard to see.