Call for Session Proposals
Panelists explore community resilience in energy systems during Local Solutions 2025. (Photo By Beam Lertbunnaphongs '25)
Resilience: Turn ideas into action!
The Call for Proposals for the 2027 Local Solutions Conference is now open. We invite municipal leaders, community organizations, practitioners, businesses, nonprofits, researchers, Tribes, and partners to share practical approaches that are helping communities, businesses, and institutions across the Northeast become better prepared, connected, and resilient so that they remain liveable and even thrive in the face of climate change and related challenges.
Opportunities to learn face-to-face from people doing this work are increasingly valuable. By sharing your work and experience, you can help peers understand not only what was accomplished, but how it was funded, designed, implemented, who was involved, what obstacles emerged, how they were overcome, what did not work as planned, and what others can learn to bring your approach to their communities.
Guidelines for Proposals
Please be sure to read all the guidelines including the full themes, session ideas, formats & proposal guidelines below prior to submitting! Proposals should not be purely academic research presentations, project showcases without transferable lessons, or sales pitches for a service or product.
What we are looking for
It is time for action, and this conference will emphasize more strongly than in previous years how resilience is getting done on the ground. Strong proposals will focus on implementation and partnership, including critical evaluations of the impacts of the actions taken.
Sessions should:
- Share best practices, tested approaches, or lessons from implementation and evaluation.
- Include more than one perspective or speaker whenever possible, particularly community, municipal and Tribal partners.
- Explain what worked, what did not, and what the team would do differently if they could do it over.
- Give attendees practical tools, strategies, examples, or next steps they can use.
- Engage attendees rather than relying only on a series of lectures or research presentations.
Session Formats:
Concurrent Session
These sessions are approximately 75 minutes, designed for multiple speakers and active audience engagement. A useful structure is 30–40 minutes of concise presentations, 20–30 minutes of facilitated discussion or activity, and time for questions and practical takeaways.
Morning Workshop
An applied learning session in which participants use a tool, work through a scenario, troubleshoot a challenge, or develop an action they can take home. Workshops should minimize lecture and clearly state what participants will produce, practice, or learn to use.
Poster Presentation
A visual presentation of a project, partnership, implementation story, tool, or emerging practice. Posters should communicate the challenge, approach, partners, outcomes, lessons learned, and relevance to other communities.