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Xavier Rolston, The Cornell Daily Sun, Apr 21, 2025 Read the full article here. One of the interns for Sustainable Finger Lakes, Nicole Collins, Cornell ’25, tabled at the Ithaca Earth Day Event. Nicole discussed the organization’s initiatives, such as the Finger Lakes Climate Fund. “If someone, say, goes on vacation and travels in an airplane, they can give a carbon offset to our organization,” Collins said. “This is really unique because it’s local, and you can see the impacts, and put your carbon offsets into your own community.”

Carbon offsets project funds local energy efficiency projects by Jan Ellen Spiegel, Yale Climate Connections October 10, 2019 For more than a decade, Gay Nicholson has encouraged people in central New York to save energy. She leads a nonprofit that helps people reduce carbon pollution. But she knows most families can only do so much. “Some of it is unavoidable,” she says. “And for some people, they’re working towards shrinking their carbon footprint, but it takes time. It’s a capital investment.” So to give people a way to offset the emissions they can’t reduce, her group launched the Finger Lakes Climate Fund in 2010. Using an online calculator, donors estimate their carbon pollution and pay a corresponding amount. That money funds local energy efficiency projects. “We feel good about our local carbon offset fund because we can offer transparency. You can see where the money went,” she says. Donors can also see how it benefits not just the climate, but local people. For example, the fund has provided efficient heating systems that help small businesses lower their bills. It’s paid to insulate cottages for the homeless. And it’s provided weatherization that helps low-income residents stay warm in winter. “A lot of them are just families,” Nicholson says, “a lot of single parents, single moms, single dads, retirees … and it feels good every time to have helped them.” Reporting credit: ChavoBart Digital Media. This article first appeared on Yale Climate Connections and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.