Keeling Curve

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Project Summary / Description:

The co-founders have both spent the past decade driving large-scale climate action. Gabe‚ teams‚ campaigns helped over 150,000 families save energy and launched hundreds of careers. Rouwenna‚ teams at ACE educated over 260,000 youth about climate change and trained ~1000 youth climate leaders. Both co-founders have seen the deep disparities in access to energy-savings, renewables, and climate education ‚ as well as the desire of people in all types of communities to act. We created All In Energy to close this gap by supporting access to and adoption of energy efficiency and clean energy sources in underprivileged communities.

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Best Estimate of GHG Avoidance/Reduction of This Project (Tonnes CO2 Equivalent/Year):

Impact on Underrepresented Groups:

We are supporting economic and gender diversity both through our programs and internally within our organization. Our outreach program is focused on reaching residents in underserved communities to ensure families can benefit from state programs that help save them energy and money at home. We currently do this work in Massachusetts, where the state has nation-leading energy incentive programs. Unfortunately, due to a combination of program design and marketing methods, communities with many low-to-moderate income families, renters and people who speak languages other than English are being underserved. In 2020, we plan to focus our outreach on executing campaigns in formal partnership with the cities of Cambridge, Lawrence and Methuen and with community partners in Boston. Residents in each of these cities face challenges to accessing the state‚ energy saving benefits. 

In Lawrence, about 70% of housing units are rentals, nearly 80% of families are Latinos and 74% speak Spanish. The average household income is 53% of the state median. While Methuen is a majority-white city, it contains neighborhoods that have high concentrations of Latinos. 77% of Methuen residents live in majority white census blocks, but 12% of residents live in census blocks where over 75% of the population is Latino. The inequities we are tackling are playing out within this gateway city, not just between cities. In Cambridge, rental units make up 64% of housing units. Renters‚ median incomes are 55% of those of homeowners and they spend twice as much of their income (30%) on housing costs compared to their wealthier, home-owning neighbors. Furthermore, in Cambridge renters are 36% more likely to be non-white or Latino than homeowners. In Boston, we focus primarily in communities of color where the housing stock is old and the median income is below the city‚ average. A recent study demonstrated that there are significant energy cost burden disparities between white and minority neighborhoods in Boston and Cambridge, with minority families spending more of their income on energy than white families at the same income level. This is true not only for the lowest-income families, but also for households whose incomes fall between 51-120% of the area median income. In all these communities, a little savings on energy can go a long way to helping these families make ends meet. By tackling inequities in access to energy efficiency services, we are also helping to address racial and economic disparities. 

Additionally, here in Massachusetts, we have one of the strongest green economies in the country, which has grown 86% since 2010 and employs 111,836 people annually. However, women are underrepresented in jobs by 40% and people of color report greater difficulty advancing. To combat this, we are focused on creating opportunities for diverse talent, especially women and people of color, to access good-paying jobs with promotion potential in the clean energy sector. This work starts internally. We are conscientiously working to build an organization that is diverse (starting with gender, race, and languages spoken) and inclusive in our culture and equitable in our practices. This foundational work is critical to our long-term success as we need a diversity of perspectives and lived experiences to engage residents in underserved communities. 

To start, we hire and train diverse staff and interns ourselves. Since our founding, we‚ ve created 6 full-time positions and 5 part-time positions and are currently hiring 2-4 more outreach staff. We also engage college interns, who are paid or receive academic credit to ensure students of all income levels can participate. We leverage these experiences to help our interns launch careers in the industry. We‚ ve engaged 9 interns since January 2019, 7 of whom have found their next paid internship or job in the clean energy industry, including 1 graduate who is now at the Acadia Center in Boston. We‚ ve just built a new partnership with Bunker Hill Community College to offer more paid internships to their students starting this spring. To date, our staff and interns have been 57% people of color, 54% women, and 48% multilingual. 

We are committed to building a multiracial, multilingual, gender-diverse team at all levels. We recognize that this is especially important as the co-founders are both white (one male and one female). We have worked hard to build a board of directors that is comprised of individuals diverse in gender and race, as well as areas of expertise. We set a goal of recruiting a board of directors that is 50% people of color and 50% female. The six board members we have recruited so far are 60% female (including one board member who identifies as a transgender female) and 40% people of color. One member represents the Codman Square community where we originally piloted our efforts. Born in Ecuador, he is a native Spanish speaker. Our burgeoning Advisory Board is 50% women and 50% people of color. We do not collect income information from our board. 

At the staff level, we are committed to fostering a more diverse senior leadership team. Half of our full time staff are men of color and two are women. Our 4-person management team is 50% women and 25% people of color. We strive to work with a diverse group of organizations and community leaders through our campaign to connect with people of all races, ages, socio-economic statuses and education levels within the communities we serve. So far, this has included working with houses of worship, senior groups, local businesses, neighborhood groups, and other local service-providing organizations. 

Beyond diversity of representation on our team, we strive to build an organization that is inclusive in culture and practices. For example, we have actively engaged our staff and interns in decision-making around our outreach campaign strategy, built a culture in which asking questions and providing creative new ideas is highly encouraged, and fostered a sense of community through team meals and weekly staff meetings. We strive to find the right balance between structure, support and autonomy for even our junior team members, so that everyone has the opportunity to take ownership of their work and thrive. As a result, our interns have developed effective systems for keeping track of the residents we speak to, created solutions to challenges we face in the field, and influenced the very early stages of our workforce development planning. 

Finally, we are working to build an equitable work culture. For example, we strive for equitable pay between our co-founders while accounting for different financial needs during our early startup period. When structuring our compensation for our full-time staff, we planned for the package to not only include a livable salary, sick time and vacation, but also a monthly health insurance stipend (as we are currently financially unable to provide insurance) and commuter benefits.

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