Winter Park Chamber leads community sustainability with innovative prosperity scorecard

Sep 13

Winter Park is one of Central Florida’s more desirable communities. It’s home to a top private college with an established shopping and dining area downtown. Its business community is engaged, led by multigenerational family residents, but filled with fresh voices and faces.

The Winter Park Chamber of Commerce has been a staple of the community since 1923, sharing its offices with the city’s Welcome Center in the heart of the community.

When COVID-19 hit, the Winter Park Chamber, like so many others, mobilized to work on a multitude of issues outside of the typical purview of a chamber, even creating an Economic Recovery Task Force.

“We became aware of needs that we didn’t traditionally look at, like poverty and food insecurity,” says the chamber’s president/CEO, Betsy Gardner Eckbert, IOM. “Afterward, we thought we needed to create a tool measuring total prosperity where everyone could plug in and see the factors that create prosperity.”

The Winter Park Prosperity Scorecard launched earlier this year. While it has the traditional aspects of prosperity models – employment, industry types, housing costs, social services – it also includes measures on sustainability and clean energy, specifically:

Public electric vehicle charging units (38 units)
Percentage of city fleet that is electric (six percent)
Breakdown of renewable/clean energy mix under city utility portfolio (20 percent)
Number of annual solar permits (residential and commercial) in the city (45 permits)

“We like going to places that align with our community,” Gardner Eckbert says. “We’re focused on incentivizing the private sector by showcasing our successes and leading in this space.”

The chamber and its leadership know sustainability efforts can be improved. The community of 25,000 residents count its embrace of solar electricity for homes and businesses as a success. But the city-owned electric utility only purchased renewable energy for 20 percent of its wholesale power.

“If you’re going to be sustainable, you want to use renewable energy for your electric vehicles,” she says. “We’d like to see strategic planning on how to grow that mix of wholesale power – we think that percentage should be much higher.”

Gardner Eckbert believes leading on the issue of sustainability should be part of any chamber’s plan. With a background in corporate governance for multinational businesses, she has personally seen how companies that embrace sustainability usually have better financial results.