NREL Communities LEAP Community Engagement Design
A Community Coalition (CC) in Minneapolis has come together to pursue greater energy resilience and reduced energy bills for low-income communities of color in the city’s neighborhoods. The CC is made up of:
- Renewable Energy Partners (REP)
- The City of Minneapolis Offices of Sustainability and Resilience
- Minneapolis Climate Action (MAC)
- The Sabathani Community Center
- The Institute for Market Transformation (IMT)
- The Minneapolis American Indian Center (MAIC)
- and the Bryant and Central Neighborhoods of Minneapolis.
The CC is pursuing these efforts through building resilience hubs and community solar gardens. The CC is planning to build three resilience hubs in low-income communities in Minneapolis. The locations are the Sabathani Community Center, the American Indian Center, and the North Minneapolis Community Resiliency Hub (REP is responsible for this site). The CC is working with the utility company, Xcel Energy, on the development of these resilience hubs and the utility will provide the battery energy storage systems tied to solar arrays. The site owners will independently purchase the solar arrays for their site.
The CC has outlined three goals for community engagement through Communities LEAP:
- Understand community priorities for pre-, during, and post-emergency or outage
- Build awareness about the resilience hubs
- Educate the community about energy resilience and sustainability
Hummingbird’s technical assistance (TA) focused on accomplishing the first community engagement goal. We conducted a Situational Analysis to research and clearly understand the project background; community conditions and characteristics; past engagement efforts; risk, environmental justice and demographic data; stakeholder and community perspectives; and recommendations for community engagement. Following the Situational Analysis, Hummingbird developed a Community Engagement Plan (CEP) for the CC to implement. The Plan includes engagement approach, communication tools, headline review of communications and media, success metrics (Soar Index), funding recommendations, and estimated budget. Additionally, we created a “Meeting-in-a-Bag” for the CC to facilitate outreach and engagement. It includes outreach and communication materials and tools; community meetings facilitation plans, activities, templates, and examples; headline review and communications template; and success metrics (Soar Index) template.
The TA provided by Hummingbird enabled the CC to reach and engage a diversity of community members and stakeholders to inform the design and services of the resilience hubs and improve their community resiliency.