Legislating for Climate Justice Starts With Listening

A 2018 town hall meeting with Illinois Republican Majority Leader Jim Durkin, State Senator John Curran, and Rep. David Olsen in Homer Glen, Illinois. (Photo courtesy of Illinois Environmental Council)

In 2021 alone, 20 separate climate-related disasters cost the United States more than $145 billion. Scientists warn we must halve harmful emissions by the end of this decade to avoid mass human suffering, meaning the short window we have left to pass policies that rapidly transition away from fossil fuels across our economy is rapidly closing.

But that narrow opportunity to act also means we can’t afford for any of the climate policies we adopt not to be effective.

Winning the kind of ambitious climate policy we desperately need requires broad, inclusive coalitions. Ensuring these policies actually achieve their aims after they are passed means integrating community needs into policy design from the outset. Passing policies that are both transformative and durable requires an inclusive policy design and organizing process that brings everyone to the table.

The Climate and Equitable Jobs Act (CEJA) that passed Illinois’ statehouse last fall is a powerful example of just such an inclusive process. CEJA puts the state on a path to achieve 100 percent clean energy by 2045 and will dramatically reduce emissions across the power, transportation, and buildings sectors; and compared to other state climate legislation, the law uniquely prioritizes clean energy investments and job creation in historically disinvested low-income and environmental justice communities.

Advocates estimate CEJA could stimulate $30 billion in new private renewables investments, spurring equitable economic growth by requiring any new project to meet diversity goals, reducing energy burdens, and supporting clean transportation, while guaranteeing family-supporting wages for workers. CEJA’s provisions also offer reinvestment opportunities in communities like East Saint Louis, Illinois. Once a thriving industrial center, this predominantly Black community now has one of the country’s highest poverty rates and is home to multiple Superfund sites. Many environmental justice communities across the state have been subject to similar, disproportionate toxic air pollution and water contamination, often due to the racist history of citing polluting facilities in Black and Brown neighborhoods.     

Now, because of CEJA, East Saint Louis and 12 other disadvantaged communities will be home to new clean energy workforce training hubs that prepare local workers for jobs in the clean energy economy and help jump-start new clean energy businesses owned by people of color.

As climate activists and funders focus on the most important policy opportunities left to cut emissions in this decisive decade, they should be guided by the lessons—and successes—that CEJA provides for how to overcome environmental injustice.

Top-Down Climate Action Doesn’t Deliver for Communities

In 2016, following two years of negotiations among utilities, consumer advocates, and environmental groups, Illinois passed the Future Energy Jobs Act (FEJA)—the state’s most significant climate legislation up to that point. FEJA set a 25 percent by 2025 renewable energy target, invested $5 billion in energy efficiency, and expanded the state’s Solar for All and clean energy job training programs to provide access to solar energy and job training in low-income and environmental justice communities.

But despite being a clean electricity win in a coal state, FEJA did nothing to address transportation, Illinois’ largest source of emissions. And in contrast to CEJA, it failed to include labor standards protecting clean energy workers or a just transition plan for displaced fossil fuel workers. It also neglected to fund outreach or programs to ensure any newly created capital would benefit those historically excluded from opportunities for wealth creation.

FEJA’s development and passage taught the state’s leading environmental organizations several lessons about what not to do. First, organizers realized they had missed an opportunity to build a broader coalition that could have pushed for a larger, more impactful bill. FEJA was largely written by energy industry insiders and policy experts, and negotiations happened behind closed doors with little transparency. Though Solar for All was a victory, the program was added only after the urging of environmental justice leaders and equity was not a focus of the negotiating process. As a result, it wasn’t as effective as it could have been. Overall, little opportunity was created for workers or marginalized populations to identify their needs or voice concerns.

As organizers had not sought input from communities at the outset, they learned outreach after a bill is already written, when the purpose is to demonstrate BIPOC and community support to legislators rather than a primary interest in addressing their concerns, smacks of tokenism. In the midst of pushing for FEJA’s passage, advocates recognized engendering trust and building the kind of broad coalition that can push for truly transformative policy means involving smaller community-based organizations from the very beginning. 

Second, advocates learned that an invitation to provide input doesn’t automatically translate to the capacity to provide input. Compared to the major green groups, community-based and environmental justice organizations are often under-resourced and understaffed, tracking multiple issues and threats to their neighborhoods. Jennifer Walling, Executive Director of the Illinois Environmental Council (IEC), told me that, without any other offer of resources, expecting feedback on a 500-page draft bill was an unrealistic ask. As a result, FEJA did not include potential insights from community members that could have strengthened the equity and justice provisions and ensured programs reached the people they were meant to reach.

Intentional educational programming wasn’t built into the bill, so eligible individuals or groups often were not aware of the new economic opportunities after the bill was passed. “After FEJA we realized we didn’t do enough to make sure communities knew how they could take advantage of the programs,” as Colleen Smith, former Director of Government Affairs at IEC told me. “The only way a bill will be successful is if communities are ready to jump feet first into these just transition programs.”     

An Entirely New Approach to Climate and Clean Energy Policymaking

The Illinois Clean Jobs Coalition, made up of hundreds of community stakeholders, first grew out of organizing to support implementation of the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan in 2014, but formed as an official coalition to pass state clean energy legislation in 2015, then expanded to draft and pass the Climate and Equitable Jobs Act. Environmental justice leaders from groups within the coalition, such as Faith in Place and Little Village Environmental Justice Organization, urged a more inclusive process to create what ultimately became CEJA.

In an early meeting to assess top learnings from FEJA and inform strategy for much more ambitious climate legislation, an environmental justice community representative urged the coalition to do much more listening than talking, explaining that listening was true leadership. Advocates made the case that only an inclusive process could generate buy-in for a far-reaching policy.

Naomi Davis, founder of Blacks in Green, speaks to a 2019 town hall meeting with Illinois State Rep. Lamont J. Robinson at the Gary Comer Youth Center in Chicago. (Photo courtesy of Illinois Environmental Council)

While the idea of a completely participatory process was new to some mainstream environmental groups, it has been standard to the environmental justice movement. Environmental justice leaders stress that justice is not only an outcome, but a process that requires inclusive, democratic decision-making, as the “Principles of Environmental Justice” make clear. As one leader shared with me, “Other people have been making decisions for my family for too long.” It was these insights that led the coalition to adopt “Listen, Lead, Share” as their approach for the legislation to come.

In 2018, the coalition set out to draft a new bill through a highly participatory process that would create a bill written by communities for communities. They established four high-level goals for the legislation: 100 percent clean energy, clean transportation, job creation, and a just transition. But while the goals were defined, how to achieve them was developed through listening sessions held in every corner of the state. In contrast to FEJA’s development, environmental justice groups and community-based organizations were engaged at the outset to help organize, host, and lead the listening sessions. IEC regranted about a quarter of a million dollars in 2018 and 2019 to support this capacity, resulting in hundreds of community listening sessions hosted by organizers in all 59 state legislative districts.  

The listening sessions were held in religious congregations, school gymnasiums, and recreation centers, ranging from small focus groups of five people to full auditoriums. They sought out people’s real challenges and worries for the clean energy transition, and gathered ideas for solutions, programs, and investments to ensure the transition’s benefits were felt equally.

CEJA’s Most Innovative Provisions Came Out of Listening Sessions

Job creation was one of the most important topics of conversation in these sessions. Organizers heard that people in low-income communities did not want new investments that would simply add low-wage jobs while real wealth-building opportunities remained concentrated among a privileged few. Black communities, environmental justice communities, and low-income communities in Illinois had simply been excluded from economic opportunity for too long. These communities understandably wanted the clean energy economy’s benefits to be felt equitably, which meant not only creating jobs that offered family-supporting wages, but offering real opportunities to own and grow businesses in their communities.

Lack of access to capital was one of the primary barriers to wealth creation identified during the listening sessions. To meet this need, participants suggested a non-profit green bank to provide low-cost capital for clean energy projects led by people of color and a grant program that would provide seed capital for upfront project development costs. Another idea generated at a listening session was that programs should help lower-income people of color start and run their own clean energy businesses. And thus, the idea for a clean energy “contractor incubator” was born.

The green bank and the contractor incubator ideas were both incorporated into the bill text. Under CEJA, contractor incubators will provide training and services that are vital for getting a      business off the ground and running, such as filing articles of incorporation. This program will help launch new solar, energy efficiency, wind, electric vehicle, and related businesses in disadvantaged communities throughout the state. A similar program, the prime contractor accelerator, will provide services for existing small clean energy businesses owned by, or employing a significant number of, people of color.

John Delurey, Senior Midwest Director for Vote Solar, noted that while several states have clean energy workforce development programs, this network of clean energy incubators and accelerators is an entirely new policy, developed at the listening sessions.

Organizers also heard again and again that while FEJA’s Solar for All program offered job training, multiple barriers prevented eligible people from participating, and eligible people often had no idea the program even existed. “Things that were promised never made their way downstate, especially training for solar installation, and we needed that to change in future legislation,” said Rev. Mike Atty, Executive Director of United Congregations of Metro East, who organized listening sessions in East Saint Louis.     

Under CEJA, $26 million per year is allocated to 13 workforce hubs that provide skills training for the clean energy economy while addressing other needs like childcare, transportation, or work clothes and tools that otherwise would have been barriers to success.

In more rural areas of Illinois, facilitators heard worries about job losses. What would happen to their families and neighborhoods when the local power plant shut down and workers lost their jobs? But facilitators also heard ideas for transforming polluting sites into centers of opportunity that were incorporated into the bill such as a “workers bill of rights” for displaced workers, incentives for coal plants to invest in on-site solar to create jobs, and millions of dollars in grants to support transitioning communities.

After an initial round of listening sessions over the course of about a year, input from thousands of participants was shared with the Clean Jobs Coalition’s drafting committee. Without these initial sessions, many of the bill’s most transformative provisions never would have been imagined or included. But the listening didn’t stop there. After the initial draft of the bill, two more rounds of listening sessions were held to gather feedback and provide education on the draft bill.

Process Leads to Passage

These additional town halls built a highly motivated grassroots base. Because they had a direct role in the creation of its policies, and because they clearly understood the benefits CEJA would bring to their daily lives, communities were highly motivated and prepared to show up at lobby days or to call their representatives. On the flip side, when environmentalists discussed the bill in the state’s capital, they could confidently and authentically point to constituent support for the bill.

The Clean Jobs Coalition honored their promises by making it clear they would never compromise equity or family-supporting job creation to achieve emissions reduction goals, and interweaving equity provisions into every aspect of CEJA made them difficult to cut from the final text. This fostered deep trust between mainstream environmental organizations and BIPOC-led community and environmental justice organizations. As the bill entered its toughest negotiations, an environmental justice leader representing those groups was always present.

Last September, after three years of organizing and months of negotiations, the Climate Equitable Jobs Act passed the Illinois state legislature by an overwhelming majority and was signed by Governor Pritzker just a few days following its passage.

Key Lessons Learned for Advocates and Funders

Climate advocates and funders should take two primary lessons away from the Illinois experience.

First, climate advocates must build partnerships with community-based organizations and environmental justice communities prior to drafting any new climate or energy policies—listening must start before pen is put to paper. Most states have greatly differing communities in terms of income, race and ethnicity, or cultural values. Authentic listening can uncover the unique needs or concerns of each community prior to legislation being introduced.

Gathering ideas for how climate policies can best improve people’s daily lives, then interweaving those policy provisions into the bill, builds buy-in across varying demographics.

Climate policy will only be effective if it can be implemented over the long-term with a dedicated base of support. Coming to community or BIPOC leaders after a bill is written—when it’s clear they are only being engaged to get a bill over the finish line—devalues individuals and undermines the trust and grassroots organizing that is essential to transformative climate policy.

“[Climate advocates] need input and truthful buy-in,” explains Andrés Jimenez, Executive Director of Green 2.0. “You can’t build support for a bill quickly. It’s clear to the community when it’s not honest.” Although climate advocates act with a sense of urgency, taking time to invest in listening and trust-building at the outset and throughout the policy process will ensure a bill that is resilient against fossil industry attacks.

Listening and engagement can also avoid spending millions of dollars on programs that don’t accomplish their ultimate goal. As the FEJA experience demonstrates, the equity provisions were insufficient to meet the needs of pollution-burdened and disinvested communities.

Second, an invitation to BIPOC-led, small community-based, or environmental justice organizations must be paired with resources to participate in the policy design or movement-building processes. Today, just slightly more than 1 percent of climate funding flows to BIPOC-led environmental justice organizations, many of which are led by volunteers or part-time staff. These activists have other responsibilities as pastors, parents, or educators in their communities and are fighting many injustices at once, such as substandard housing, police intimidation, lack of access to high-quality education or health care. For instance, when Rev. Atty was approached to work on CEJA, he was also in the middle of a tough fight to stop a permit for a local incinerator threatening to spew toxic pollution into his community.

IEC supported participation in the CEJA process by providing funding to dozens of small organizations across the state, complete toolkits to conduct listening sessions, and flexibility to adapt sessions to the local community. Other large environmental organizations can follow this blueprint to build trust and an inclusive movement that secures broad-based decarbonization policies by reallocating resources toward local, community-based organizations while advocating for funders to devote more dollars to these groups.

Ohio’s Climate Justice Fund recently launched their own “Listen, Lead, Share” efforts, granting between $10,000 and $30,000 to organizations led or governed by people of color to host community conversations across the Buckeye State. For a state long beholden to the whims of fossil fuel interests, the listening sessions are the first step toward building grassroots power in support of equitable climate policies.

Our country is at a crossroads, simultaneously confronting our racist past and fighting to avoid a dangerous climate future. Authentic listening can enable the kind of policymaking that will truly transform our society, providing healthier places to live and equitable economic opportunities for everyone. But taking advantage of this opportunity demands a different kind of leadership that centers the needs and voices of those most impacted by both racism and climate change.

Read more stories by Sarah Spengeman.