Story of TCAP

The purpose of the Teton Climate Action Partnership (TCAP) is to provide a collaborative, equitable, adaptive, community-wide action structure for catalyzing projects that meaningfully and equitably transition the Teton region to a zero carbon economy and society by 2030.

TCAP is a collaboration of autonomous actors committed to common principles. It is not an entity that receives or distributes funding, nor is it an oversight structure.
TCAP is a collaboration centered on equity. Accountability is provided by the public through the outreach of the TCAP Equity and Community Engagement team.
TCAP is a collaborative forum for identifying, launching, and celebrating equitable climate action. It is also an open source of climate action plan content.

Thank you to all of those who have participated in TCAP.

Stories of Collaboration

The story of TCAP is a parallel plot composed of the braided narratives of the collaborators.

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The Creation of Teton Climate Action Partnership

One particularly cold January night in 2020 wasn’t just any night. A group of Jackson Hole community members ventured downtown, walked through the door of the Pink Garter Theater, shook off the cold and stepped into a new chapter of their lives in the Tetons.

That evening, Jackson’s former mayor, Pete Muldoon, took the stage to call audience members to action. Under the glow of a single theater light, Mayor Pete rallied attendees to confront the growing impacts of climate change in the town. Filling many rows of the Pink Garter, those gathered knew that their community required greater resiliency to face the impacts of a changing climate. It was time to get to work. An updated Jackson/Teton County Comprehensive Plan and this chilly night’s call to action spurred the formation of the initiative that would bring dozens of local, regional and national partners together in a ground-breaking effort.

Teton Climate Action Partnership History

In January 2020, an open community meeting on climate action was convened at the Pink Garter Theater by Mayor Pete Muldoon. Spurred to action out of that convening, on April 6, 2020, the Town Council adopted Resolution 20-05, committing to carbon neutrality by 2030. In the fall of 2020 a group of public and nonprofit actors began collaborating to catalyze climate action.

In the late spring of 2021, the climate action collaboration took shape as Teton Climate Action Partnership (TCAP) Facilitated by LegacyWorks Group with additional leadership from the JH Climate Action Collective, Town of Jackson, Energy Conservation Works, Riverwind Foundation, Sunrise Movement JH, Voices JH, and Yellowstone Teton Clean Cities, TCAP engaged 80+ community members in 10 temporary teams to identify opportunities, take the first steps toward collaborative actions, and develop a framework or ongoing collaboration. This initial organization was the partnership’s startup phase and culminated with the launch of tetonclimateaction.org in May 2022.

The partnership is now in its continuous phase. The continuous phase is an ongoing, adaptive cycle of climate action identification, equitable engagement, and impact reporting. It is guided by the collaborative framework, which was developed in the startup phase and has since been adapted to meet the needs of the collaborators. The temporary teams of the startup phase evolved into the TCAP Sector Teams. The sector team and cross-sector coordination meetings are the heart of the TCAP collaboration, and nearly everyone originally involved in the startup phase was excited to continue the work.

The accountability provided by the originally convened leaders has evolved to be more inclusive and equitable. The initiators still provide leadership by serving as team leaders and providing staff support to the partnership. They also seek to engage marginalized voices more heavily in these roles and provide more equitable accountability through public outreach intended to collect a more inclusive evaluation of the opportunities and needs for climate action.