The week of June 10, Atlas Buildings Hub staff had the opportunity to travel to New Orleans for the inaugural Clean Buildings Healthy Communities convening. This effort brought together community-based organizations (CBOs), technical assistance providers, researchers, and funders to strategize around the goal of ensuring fossil fuel-free buildings for all in the United States by 2050. Here are a few takeaways and reflections from the convening.
One of the week’s major themes was highlighting the importance of CBOs. These groups have their ears to the ground, so they deeply understand the concerns of their communities and aim to represent their desires in the action they take. National advocacy groups, as well as research firms like Atlas, expressed a desire to work more closely with CBOs to provide data and insights that can help arm those communities with the information necessary to design solutions that make sense for them.
Additionally, there is a large, stated interest in creative solutions to surmount the challenges in the path of building electrification and decarbonization. For example, groups with legal expertise provided suggestions on alternatives to outright “gas bans” in the wake of the Ninth Circuit’s ruling against Berkeley’s prohibition on new gas infrastructure. These alternatives could include improving building codes to better incentivize electrification, building performance standards, utility rate reform, and more. A future Buildings Hub digest will explore some of these approaches.
Finally, there is a lot of great work happening in communities to simultaneously electrify buildings and make communities more resilient. We had the opportunity to visit a few sites around the city that are increasing the capacity of the community to use clean electricity and respond to disasters. For example, Broadmoor Community Church serves as a community lighthouse, a community space that has been prepared to help residents during a disaster (Figure 1). The community lighthouse program is the brainchild of Louisiana pastors who identified the need for these spaces to provide aid during disasters.
Figure 1: Broadmoor Church in New Orleans
Broadmoor Community Church in New Orleans, Louisiana is outfitted with solar panels and batteries. It serves as a “community lighthouse” that provides power to charge phones, power devices, and refrigerate medications during disasters.
Broadmoor Church has solar panels and battery storage that can be islanded from the grid to provide power if the grid is unavailable. Leaders at the church also provide charging stations for phones and other small electronics, rent out small batteries to power small fans or critical medical devices at home, and offer cold storage for medications that need to be refrigerated. Funding for this effort came from a variety of Congressional appropriations and city grants. The church is seeking out additional funding opportunities to bolster its services. Programs such as the community lighthouse effort are born out of the needs of the communities they serve, creating capacity in those communities and allowing them to flexibly respond to climate and financial challenges.
The convening in New Orleans provided an excellent opportunity to meet with and understand the needs of CBOs across the country, as well as long-standing partner organizations working both nationally and locally. We are grateful to Energy Foundation and Common Spark Consulting for the opportunity to participate and look forward to further engagements with organizations under the Clean Buildings Healthy Communities banner.
