“BEAT is my favorite environmental organization in the Berkshires. They are a hands-on, hard-working group who always do interesting projects to help the local environment and wildlife. Whether pulling invasives, cleaning up rivers, playing crossing guard for salamander migrations, or offering educational workshops, they rock.” —BEAT volunteer
If you could collect all the bad news you hear about the state of the environment the way you collect garbage, and find a container big enough to hold it, it still wouldn’t outmatch the amount of passion and determination you’d witness in an hour-long visit with Jane Winn, executive director of the local nonprofit Berkshire Environmental Action Team (BEAT).
Many Berkshire organizations are reaching milestone birthdays this year, and BEAT is no exception, celebrating 20 years in September. It was founded by Winn and a group of volunteers (including her husband Bruce) in 2002 when faculty at Berkshire Community College (BCC) expressed concerns about a proposed soccer field and requested their help.
Since then, BEAT has garnered over 100 reviews on the GreatNonprofits’ Top-Rated Nonprofits Guide and earned a platinum seal of transparency. World-renowned environmentalist Bill McKibben (founder of 360.org) praised it as “a prime example of how the local and the global can mesh. They’re doing great work in the mountains of Massachusetts, where they’ve helped block pipelines, but they also connect it up to the rest of the world. This is precisely the mix we need!”
Homegrown conservation
Winn, who grew up in Pittsfield in a home bordering the Housatonic River, recalls seeing fire burning in the river as a child due to its pollution-laden waters. “I thought I was good at catching frogs until I went to camp,” she recalls. “That was during the GE heyday of the 1960s. I didn’t understand why nobody was doing anything.”
She went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in biology at Quinnipiac, followed by a master’s in zoology at UMass Amherst. After they married, she and her husband ran a science store (The Nature of Things at Brushwood Farm) for many years—“one of the few couples who could stand to work together,” she notes. When redirecting their energy to environmental leadership and education with a small group of community members with science degrees, they were stunned to learn how many environmental laws in Massachusetts weren’t being enforced. The couple started holding meetings in their home in 2003, sacrificing more rooms each year to accommodate six staff members and dozens of volunteers eventually.
In 2019 BEAT began a capital campaign to raise funds to purchase the former Immanuel Community Church building at 20 Chapel Street in Pittsfield, conduct a “deep energy retrofit” as an energy efficiency demonstration project, and restore its adjacent streams, banks, and property with native plantings. Pitching its campaign to 100 donors over Zoom during the height of the pandemic, the nonprofit quickly raised $175,000 ($25,000 of which were in-kind donations)—enough to purchase the building.
“I thought fundraising was the hardest thing until I realized it involved talking about what we want to do and inviting others to invest in our vision,” Winn notes. BEAT applied for, and was granted, an additional $200,000 in matching funds to go toward the renovation project from the Massachusetts Cultural Council’s Cultural Facilities Fund. It also received significant support from the Jane and Jack Fitzpatrick Trust and the Wyomissing Foundation.
A team that owns the mission
When asked about the team, Winn gushes with pride as she describes the organization’s devoted stewards—including Board Chair Elia Del Molino, No Fracked Gas in Mass director Rosemary Wessel, Education & Outreach Coordinator Chelsey Simmons, MCLA student Andrew Ferrara (who works on their Zero Waste initiative), and three current Miss Hall’s Horizons interns who are conducting research for the Massachusetts Climate Action Network (MCAN). “All of them are like my family,” Winn beams, sharing details of past workers’ current positions with organizations such as Greenagers (Sheffield), MCAN (Boston), and Potomac Conservancy (Washington, DC).
BEAT’s mission (per its website) is to “protect the environment for wildlife in support of the natural world that sustains us all,” with three areas of focus: stewardship, education and outreach, and watchdogging.
You need several hours to grasp the scope of its involvement across the state, though a quick perusal of the website and latest newsletter provides an inkling—surveying stormwater outfalls, tackling invasive plant removals, leading river clean-ups, and supporting wildlife connectivity, to name just a few.
In its watchdog role, BEAT also monitors air pollution and incineration. The team put together a coalition of organizations that met with representatives from Cogentrix (an energy company that manages and operates power generation facilities) and convinced them to shut down the Doreen and Woodland electric generators, which were 50 to 60 years old, highly polluting when they ran, and cost ratepayers too much money. As such, the company is also replacing the generators’ power with solar in Westfield, where a third peaking power plant (“peaking” means it only runs when there is high demand) owned by Cogentrix has also been closed. BEAT’s goal is to eventually shut down all remaining peaking power plants in Massachusetts and replace them with clean energy.
BEAT also played a crucial role in shutting down the proposed Kinder Morgan fracked gas pipeline and reaching the GE Housatonic remediation settlement agreement.
“In the end, we accepted the dump but got GE to remove almost 100 acres of additional river sediment and the EPA’s pledge in writing to continually explore methods of breaking down PCBs to clean up the river,” Winn explains. Even still, she points to a tragic decrease (10 to 12 years) in life expectancy among residents of the West Side, North Street, and Morningside neighborhoods of Pittsfield.
Community building for a cause
“You can see, I think we’re doing important work,” she says with conviction. In addition to responding to alerts by residents and commenting/testifying on environmental legislation issues, BEAT offers countless opportunities for locals to interact with nature through winter wildlife tracking, amphibian crossing assistance, bird banding, and more. Monthly “Green Drinks” and other community events invite more people into the conversation and help expand and educate the network of volunteers and donors.
As Winn ponders the stack of thank-you notes that need to be personalized and the annual mailing to donors (approximately 600 previous and 1400 prospective), she conveys a surprising joie de vivre. “Another chance to talk about what we’re doing and invite others to invest!”
Her only regret? “We feel like we’re saving the world, making it really hard to stop on the weekends.”
To learn how you can help, go to www.thebeatnews.org.
