Clean Energy Works’ first Fellowship cohort has completed their projects on advancing inclusive utility investment in their communities. These eight Fellows, representing regions from California to North Carolina, began their journey at the start of 2025 and brought deep local knowledge to the work. Together, their projects offer practical tools for mobilizing community power and ensuring inclusive utility investments reflect local goals and priorities. By centering community input, Fellows were able to create strategies and resources that will continue to support community-led impact well beyond the Fellowship.
Building Stronger Networks for Community Impact
Fellows aimed to find better ways to connect organizations and community leaders with technical resources. They recognized that a networked approach would enable more shared learning and collective problem-solving. By first mapping their communities to understand its composition of power dynamics and priority stakeholders, they identified gaps in relationships, influence, data, and coordination necessary to address to advance their goals. They grounded their analysis in community listening and feedback, supporting intentional power-building within their communities. Fellows worked through the elements of a plan for effective engagement, aiming to maximize community benefit from inclusive utility investments.
Accelerating Impact through Community-Centered Strategies
Next, Fellows assessed the barriers to implementing and scaling inclusive utility investments in their communities. What would improving access to energy upgrades look like in their community? What effort supports households with the highest need in achieving upgrades? Fellows explored the challenges to scaling grants-based programs and differences with a utility investment model, particular emphasis on consumer protections central to inclusive utility investments. One Fellow highlighted how intentional capital sourcing can further de-risk inclusive utility investments while directing capital toward historically underserved communities.
Fellows sought to build internal capacity at their organizations through projects that directly addressed their community’s needs. Each project focused on strategies for building knowledge and motivation among key stakeholders to understand the ways inclusive utility investments can support their communities:
- Equity analyses of existing programs identified gaps in reducing energy burden and opportunities to scale inclusive utility investments in their communities.
- Stakeholder tables and convenings built stronger collaboration between cooperatives, investor-owned utilities, advocates, and funders.
- Campaigns utilized community listening to inform strategies and led to greater engagement, especially among historically disenfranchised communities.
- Educational resources were created to demystify equitable financial mechanisms and highlight lessons learned from pilot programs.
- Updated toolkits and working group frameworks strengthened community organizing and provided clear pathways for advancing inclusive utility investment policies and programs.
Central to this work is building trust through sustained relationships with member-owners of rural electric co-ops, who prioritize efforts around affordability, workforce development, business and vendor opportunities, cleaner environments, and broader community revitalization.
Beyond the Fellowship
Fellows equipped communities, advocates, and institutions across regions with practical tools to move forward, and have already begun to see new individuals and organizations. In Missouri, North Carolina, California, and beyond, the work to mobilize others to scale the impact of inclusive utility investments in communities is underway.
The culmination of the Fellowship journey was marked by their projects transforming months of learning, collaboration, and reflection into concrete plans and materials. The network formed by Fellows’ relationships ensures that progress in one place informs strategies elsewhere, reinforcing the Fellowship’s commitment to collective power. These relationships reaffirmed the Fellowship’s vision: justice-centered energy transitions are not only possible — they are already underway, led by communities equipped with the tools, networks, and confidence to champion inclusive utility investments for the long-term.
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