Achieving a healthy New England means looking at the environment as more than one’s natural surroundings.

New England’s environment includes all of the places we live, work, play, and learn.

Creating healthy communities that are resilient in the face of climate impacts means putting people and their well-being at the center of our work. That’s why we help to create affordable neighborhood housing developments close to open space, healthy food, and public transit. It’s why we push for a strong, local food economy regionwide. And it’s why we work to make sure people and communities can bounce back from the extreme weather climate change is already bringing to our neighborhoods.

Our Solutions

  • SUPPORTING HEALTHY NEIGHBORHOODS: We’re pushing innovative strategies, research, and investments that center community voices and transform neighborhoods.
  • GETTING READY FOR CLIMATE IMPACTS: We’re making sure our communities are prepared for the climate fallout we can no longer avoid – so New Englanders can not only survive but thrive in a changing climate.  
  • GROWING LOCAL FOOD: We’re helping build a regional food system that supports access to fresh healthy food, creates jobs, cuts emissions, protects farmland, and grows our local economy.

Our Vision

We believe that our environment – whether it’s forests and fields or buildings and streets – should sustain our health, our wellbeing, and our sense of connectedness to each other and the world at large. We believe that neighbors should have a voice in decisions that affect their homes and quality of life. We believe that everyone should feel secure that their home, their street, and their community are fortified against climate impacts. This is the New England CLF is fighting to create.

What We’re Up Against

Resilience to extreme heat and flooding, safety from hazards like lead and mold, affordable and stable housing, access to healthy and budget-friendly food – these factors and more affect individual health. Collectively, they can add up to greater burdens community-wide, furthering the structural injustices and inequities facing communities of color and people from lower-income neighborhoods.

When it comes to solutions to these issues, these same communities have ideas and aspirations, but too often, they have change imposed on them by outside forces – change that destabilizes tight-knit neighborhoods and worsens environmental harms.

CLF is working to change that script. This breadth of work builds on CLF’s core strengths, from legislative advocacy to legal watchdog. It also lets us use newer tools, including innovative impact investment strategies and community-based research that centers resident input and direction. Working with community, business, and philanthropic partners, we are transforming systems, markets, and laws to innovate better solutions to advance human and environmental health and resilience.