In Boston, we’ve been starting to find out. And I am pleased to introduce a new report, “A City at Work,” which details the evolving story of what Boston Mayor Tom Menino once called “the biggest team effort in our city’s history.”
The report focuses on Boston’s Green Ribbon Commission. Formed in 2010, the Commission is a group of more than thirty business and civic leaders who are helping Boston implement its Climate Action Plan. They are also leading by example, adopting efficiency and clean-energy practices in their own institutions and organizing their peers to do the same.

To document the evolving story of the Green Ribbon Commission, we commissioned Dave Denison, an independent writer who specializes in governmental reporting.
The Commission was also recently featured as a success story of community-wide engagement in Guide to Greening Cities, a new book from Island Press by Sadhu Aufochs Johnston, Steven S. Nicholas, and Julia Parzen.
The Commission’s executive director, John Cleveland, and two of its members—Brian Swett, chief of environment and energy for the City of Boston, and John Messervy, director of capital and facilities planning for Partners HealthCare—were also interviewed by GreenBiz Group CEO Eric Faurot in this video from the VERGE Boston 2013 conference.