City of Northfield

Northfield is a safe, open, and welcoming environment and is dedicated to sustainably enhancing and preserving its vibrant culture, celebrated arts, and excellent quality of life. The City of Northfield works for the common good and improvement of the Northfield community by providing innovative municipal services that carry out the city’s vision for a high quality of life for all. Their services range from community updates, business assistance, to housing development. Click on this link to learn more about their strategic city plans.

The City of Northfield has collaborated with St. Olaf for years in the drafting and implementation of their Climate Action Plan (CAP). The CAP includes items related to education, policy, planning, innovation, and demonstration around energy efficiency in homes. In fall 2019, the City of Northfield worked with St. Olaf’s environmental studies courses in assistance with developing Net Zero Energy and Affordable Housing under CAP. In this project, St. Olaf students gathered relevant information and resources which were shared with city staff, developers, builders, and others interested in moving net-zero energy housing forward. In addition, the City of Northfield has been working on reducing recycling contamination and looking into expanding organics recycling. With an attempt to bring some of the more theoretical items in the CAP into a usable material that can be implemented, the collaboration also expanded to determine some other actions the City of Northfield can take to move toward their zero-waste policy – “zero landfills” scenario – within the next 10 years.

In Fall 2020, the City of Northfield and St.Olaf students worked together to create sustainability “tours” of local energy and other sustainability-related projects. One tour focused on residential and one on businesses. The tours were virtual due to the on-going pandemic. Topics they focused on include efficient and renewable energy, land use, transportation, food and water, etc.

Beth Kallestad, the program director of the City of Northfield, shared that the collaboration between the City of Northfield and St. Olaf has been really good. Having resources that staff and partners can have readily available provided opportunities for them to get the work done, which they wouldn’t have been able to otherwise. Even for the projects that didn’t turn out as they had previously envisioned, it offered valuable information for them to change directions and to go forward.

“The ACE component is very crucial in college courses”, Beth told the ACE office. She further stated that students know a lot more about some theoretical things than she and her organization do. Meanwhile, she and her organization know how the real world works and have insights into the realities the students are soon going to be in. Students’ takes and interpretations on current issues had added interesting dynamics to the City of Northfield. Such collaboration pushed those boundaries and made it possible for them to complete their projects.