City + College, One Climate Plan: Decatur and Agnes Scott Turn Local Risks into Community-Rooted Resilience
Kimberly Reeves
Executive Director of the Center for Sustainability, Agnes Scott College
Kimberly Reeves
Executive Director of the Center for Sustainability, Agnes Scott College
Kimberly Reeves is an experienced Director specializing in sustainability, climate action, and justice within higher education. With expertise in strategic planning, assessment, educational campaigns, and event coordination, she supports grant committees and leads recycling/composting initiatives. Holding a Master's degree in Environmental Planning and Design from The University of Georgia, Kimberly is passionate about community engagement and social services, driving impactful environmental change through education and collaboration.
Dr. Patricia L. Yager leads the Georgia Climate Project and is a climate scientist and Professor of Marine Sciences at the University of Georgia. She investigates how marine ecosystems interact with and respond to climate change, integrating fieldwork, laboratory analysis and modeling.
Her work focuses on polar regions and tropical oceans, examining impacts of melting ice, nutrient fluxes and circulation shifts on marine productivity and carbon cycling.
We heard from three key leaders at the forefront of an innovative city-college climate partnership: Kimberly Reeves, Executive Director of the Center for Sustainability at Agnes Scott College, David Nifong, Energy and Sustainability Manager for the City of Decatur and Dr. Patricia Yager, Professor and Climate Scientist at the University of Georgia. Together, they explore the multi-year collaboration between a small liberal arts college and a progressive municipality, united by a shared commitment to climate resilience. Grounded in a localized vulnerability assessment, their work showcases how targeted planning, creative capacity-building and equity-driven implementation can produce scalable, community-rooted solutions to the climate crisis.
Planning with Purpose: Grounding Climate Action in Local Risk
Rather than approaching climate resilience through broad or abstract categories, the team grounded its work in a vulnerability assessment that pinpointed Decatur’s specific challenges: extreme heat, energy insecurity and two forms of flooding. This local lens shaped the structure of subcommittees and action plans, ensuring the initiative responded directly to the lived experience of residents. By embedding resilience into ongoing work across public works, housing and emergency services, the partnership built clarity and momentum without forcing new bureaucratic layers.
Focusing on real risks instead of generalized climate threats helped garner meaningful support and made the work more actionable.
A turning point in the collaboration came with the addition of an AmeriCorps VISTA position, co-funded by the college and the city. This role became a vital link between academic cycles and municipal implementation timelines, expanding both vision and execution. Partnering with a local nonprofit that provides free home repairs for seniors, the VISTA helped integrate sustainability into long-standing equity work. For example, during an MLK weekend project, the team diverted more than 4.5 tons of waste from landfills by sorting materials from home cleanouts—ensuring that donated goods and recyclables were kept out of the trash. This approach revealed how layering a climate lens onto existing service efforts can magnify impact and foster deeper trust in underserved communities.
Responsive Planning in Real Time
While the team followed a clear plan, they also left space to address emerging challenges. One unforeseen development was the growing number of residents losing homeowners insurance due to aerial surveillance that flagged aging roofs and overhanging trees. This issue, though not originally part of the climate plan, quickly became a priority. The group responded by working with a community land trust to fund roof repairs and exploring ways to provide free arborist assessments. This flexibility—recognizing that resilience is not just about weather events but also about structural inequities—demonstrated the partnership’s commitment to holistic climate adaptation.
Avoiding redundancy was a key strategy in maintaining momentum and buy-in. The climate team mapped its 70-plus actions against existing city and college strategic plans, discovering that nearly half were already underway through other initiatives. By applying a resilience lens to current projects—such as infrastructure upgrades, building retrofits and affordable housing—they were able to enhance impact without requiring entirely new programs or funding streams. As Nifong noted, the intentional alignment allowed both institutions to move faster and more efficiently while reinforcing shared priorities.
Grassroots Engagement with Institutional Backbone
The project’s durability has depended on both high-level commitment and deep community involvement. From the beginning, leadership from the city and college offered visible support, but much of the work was carried by residents, students and nonprofit partners. Regular meetings with emergency staff, subcommittee leadership roles and collaborations with faith groups and researchers created a strong foundation of shared ownership. The partnership also yielded scalable tools—such as weatherization guides and interactive dashboards—that can be adapted by other communities. Dr. Yager emphasized that combining grassroots input with institutional stability helped the initiative survive leadership changes and keep long-term goals in sight.
This city-college collaboration offers a powerful example of how climate planning, when rooted in local needs and built through inclusive partnerships, can deliver outcomes that are both practical and transformative. By aligning institutional goals with community realities, Decatur and Agnes Scott have charted a path that other cities and colleges can follow—proving that even small-scale initiatives can help lead the way in building climate resilience.
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