About
Purpose
What is the Energy Democracy Project?
The Energy Democracy Project is a collaboration of more than 30 diverse, local, frontline organizations across the United States. Together, we strengthen our collective efforts to democratize energy, and advance the emerging energy democracy movement across the country.
The Project is distinct in its mission to build the energy democracy movement through dynamic organizational collaboration:
Structure
How does our collaboration work?
The Energy Democracy Project consists of a decentralized group of Project Collaborators who believe in the idea that community ownership and control of the clean energy transition are a means to bring about racial and economic equity. While we celebrate our diversity, we come together based on our Shared Values and Purpose.
This collaboration centers on the programmatic initiatives of the Project’s Working Committees, each anchored by two Collaborators. Together, these Anchor members guide and support the Project in our Steering Committee, where they are responsible for creating and overseeing a system of decentralized, participatory, and inclusive activities.
Project Collaborators
Who is behind the Energy Democracy Project?
Our Project Collaborators are primarily local frontline organizations across the U.S spread across race, class, and geography. These organizations are engaged in a broad range of energy democracy efforts geared to local conditions. Most of them are significantly under-resourced and value the collective support that the Project seeks to provide.
Our Collaborators have two main characteristics:
1.We work to build community ownership and control of clean energy resources
2.We promote racial and economic equity as a cornerstone of the clean energy transition
By following our shared values and purpose in solidarity with each other, we produce emergent solutions that prioritize justice in the transition of energy resources. Interested in collaborating? Please fill out this interest form.
Origin
How did the Energy Democracy Project come together?
The Energy Democracy Project is an outgrowth of efforts begun in 2015 to highlight work being done in communities across the U.S.—primarily low-income communities and communities of color—to empower their communities by harnessing local renewable energy resources. This has meant not only providing for community energy needs, but also struggling against many forms of institutionalized energy injustice.
Early practitioners of these efforts understood this emerging movement as the struggle to democratize energy in the U.S. They contributed to the groundbreaking Energy Democracy: Advancing Equity in Clean Energy Solutions book in 2017. Since then, collaborative efforts like the Energy Democracy National Tour in 2018 and the first Strategic Convening on Energy Democracy in 2019, led to the founding of the Energy Democracy Project in 2020. Through this information sharing and trust building vehicle, we have been growing our collective narrative power and have been cultivating an environment for innovative exchanges and learning amongst nearly 40 Project Collaborator organizations.
Most recently, we have united behind a national Reimagined Energy for Our Communities, U.S. (REFOCUS) campaign. REFOCUS is a collaborative effort to build an alternative to the centralized energy model of electric utilities and restore the power of communities to develop, share, and benefit from local renewable energy resources. Through narrative tools, stories, demands, and action we’re growing the movement for energy democracy and forging the path towards energy justice.
Our efforts have already increased the visibility of energy democracy as a way to establish a new energy paradigm, fight against the existing unjust energy establishment, and pursue a transition to alternative energy models and solutions as part of a broader transformation of society centered around justice and human rights. The Energy Democracy Project demonstrates a unified commitment to addressing the multifaceted challenges of democratizing the energy sector.
How is energy democracy a critical climate solutions strategy?
A political framework
People around the world have taken up the life-and-death struggle to end our dependence on fossil fuels and transition to renewable energy sources.
Implementing that transition is not mainly a technological problem. Rather, this transition requires a struggle against powerful economic and political interests and the consumerist, unlimited growth ideology that supports those interests.
And that struggle to democratize energy is also a struggle to define an alternative energy model, one that empowers our communities and serves our needs to survive and prosper.
That alternative energy future involves a new energy paradigm: where energy is not simply a commodity, but a shared economic resource of our communities; where energy development does not destroy our ecosystem, but respects it; where energy is not an amplifier of injustice, but a resource for equity and empowerment.
Energy Democracy is therefore a climate solutions strategy: it’s about local communities taking into their own hands the responsibility of building a cleaner and more equitable energy future.
The Energy Democracy Project represents the efforts of its Collaborators to increase the visibility and strength of the energy democracy movement—to enable it to define a new energy paradigm, to struggle against the existing energy establishment, and to pursue the transition to alternative energy system models and solutions.
