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 Our History GreenFaith was founded in 1992 as Partners for Environmental Quality by Jewish and Christian leaders who believed that New Jersey ’s religious community needed an organization to connect diverse religious traditions with the environment. One of our earliest accomplishments was to convene a conference at Drew University. Entitled “Partners for Environmental Quality,” it brought together stakeholders from the religious, academic, governmental and business sectors to explore common interests in relation to environmental protection. For our first several years, we were an all-volunteer coalition, with lay and ordained leaders traveling to houses of worship to discuss the relationship between religion and the earth. A new awareness was just beginning to dawn within the religious community about this link, and we were among the first to explore it. In the late 1990s, United Jewish Communities of MetroWest and the Episcopal Diocese of Newark each provided seed funding which enabled us to hire staff to promote the use of renewable energy by religious institutions and people of faith. We were the first group in New Jersey to promote “green energy” usage by the general public, and we partnered with Green Mountain Energy to publicize the fact that individuals could now purchase clean, renewable electricity. In the early 2000s, we focused our efforts on energy conservation and the use of renewable energy in religious institutions, and then expanded our efforts to include extensive guest preaching and speaking engagements. This was followed by our first Environmental Health and Justice Tour in Newark, where we explored ways in which urban communities suffer disproportionately from environmental health threats. In 2003, in partnership with Sun Farm Network, we launched Lighting the Way, a program to install solar panels on religious institutions around the state. Since then, we have celebrated the installation of 25 solar arrays around New Jersey . In 2004, we launched Sustainable Sanctuaries, our initiative to work in-depth with select houses of worship around the state to integrate environmental care into their worship, education, facility management and outreach. This program – the first of its kind in the country – has provided opportunities for over a dozen houses of worship to become true religious-environmental leaders. GreenFaith has been fortunate to receive recognition for its work from the US Environmental Protection Agency, which recognized us with their 2003 Energy Star for Congregations Special Award, from then Gov. James McGreevey who issued a proclamation in support of our work, and from Gov. Jon Corzine, who named GreenFaith’s Executive Director Fletcher Harper the Environmental Leader of the Year in New Jersey in 2006.
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