1000 Friends of Connecticut 

1000 Friends of Connecticut is a statewide organization whose mission is to promote and shape growth to ensure a prosperous economy, a healthy natural environment, and distinctive mixed-income communities while promoting opportunities in education, housing, transportation, and employment for ourselves and future generations.

To accomplish this mission, 1000 Friends of Connecticut will work to:

• Strengthen and direct new development towards communities where infrastructure is already in place in order to  revitalize community centers, and more effectively use taxpayers’ money by maximizing the value of their investments already made;
  
• Encourage compact, diverse, and livable communities by offering a wide range of housing choices and encouraging a mixture of land uses, preserving and restoring historic and cultural assets, designing to human scale, and providing comfortable walking, biking, and transit opportunities;
  
• Support high quality public transportation and transit-oriented development as preferred alternatives to the single-passenger automobile in order to reduce traffic congestion and air pollution, positively affect business location decisions, and provide greater access to job opportunities;
• Promote quality educational and housing opportunities for all our state’s residents. 
  

1000 Friends of Connecticut will pursue its goals by:

• Educating and mobilizing the public at the local, state, and regional levels, and convening and mediating among diverse stakeholders to build statewide support for smart growth principles;
• Researching fiscal, regulatory, land-use, transportation and other smart growth initiatives; 
• Promoting the adoption of policies, initiatives, and practices by government, business, and other institutions that encourage economic growth while preserving the state’s quality of life – including adaptive reuse, historic preservation, reuse of land or property and redevelopment of brownfields;
• Opposing government action that encourages development of greenfields that requires governments to absorb the cost of more and more local roadways, longer water and electrical lines, larger sewer systems, and public services (like police and fire protection, schools, libraries;
  
• Building and sustaining a constituency for Smart Growth and social equity by providing tools and models to measure progress and to advocate for change.