Fresh Energy CI Report – Final

What has been most instrumenta to your progress?

The insight gathering from community leaders who are in the energy and housing space and building relationships to drive our work was most instrumental in our progress. Making insights a cornerstone of the content and narrative is key for adoption and use of the information we seek to get in the hands of property dwellers and property owners. Our charge to update the Education, Information, Education, Resource Guide (ENERG guide) starts and ends with community engagement of communities most affected by energy and housing issues. The time we spent with community groups who interface, advocate and interact directly with some of our potential users of the ENERG guide was invaluable. Not only did it inform the new narrative and language to support it, we also learned about mechanisms for connection and how our targets get information related to their homes and neighborhoods today.

Fresh Energy and Community Stabilization Project (CSP) in partnership used iterative community engagement processes to build a narrative around the topics of safe affordable and comfortable housing and accessible clean and mutually beneficial energy efficiency within the ENERG guide. To build this narrative we needed to dig into the language we use to talk about these issues and how we describe the people who are affected by them. Language is instrumental to crafting inclusive and aware dialogue, we knew we needed to move to asset based and supportive language and that is important because for people to see the benefit of energy efficiency they need to see themselves in the conversation. A major update was transitioning the language of tenant and landlord, to property owner and property dweller.

Along with producing the ENERG guide, CSP and Fresh Energy worked to socialize policy ideas with City decision makers, including staff at City departments and City Councilmembers. Both CSP and Fresh Energy also helped shape city-level energy policies to benefit property owners and property dwellers in Minneapolis. Fresh Energy convened a series of meetings bringing in equity and environmental justice-focused groups to shape Saint Paul’s draft Climate Action Plan. Fresh Energy and CSP also produced an informational video discussing the impacts of energy costs on property dwellers, which is available on Fresh Energy’s website and social media. In 2018, CSP held a series of events called Landlord Resource Seminars, designed to connect property owners to information on energy efficiency programs and additional strategies to improve their buildings.

Key lessons learned

We learned that we needed to have context to this framing of housing, energy and environmental justice, and that meant not just creating a resource guide and assuming what information should be in it. As we shopped around the ENERG guide to community partners, we got a lot of feedback of what could be clearer, more concise, more visual, and what information was missing. The guide went through many versions and yet we still know that we need more direct materials to specified audiences. This led us to the most current version of the ENERG guide which includes a website, two one-pagers, a table tent for events, and fresh branding and logo by our communications partner Relationships Matter Now. We learned we needed to go out for help to synthesize a comprehensive message. We realized the difficulty of conveying and communicating truly authentic messaging that is accessible and digestible and to carry out that communication in a way that ensures equitable benefits in rental properties in Saint Paul.

We learned that doing this work in partnership was essential, but not simple. Fresh Energy and CSP have different models and capacities, so that meant working through where our strengths and weaknesses exist and stretching to make sure that we moved this project together. That meant understanding our communications styles, landing together on contracting with Relationships Matter Now, and focusing on the various moving pieces that this grant work entailed from the community gathering sessions to the policy discussions.

Reflections on the community innovation process

Honestly, it is difficult to pinpoint the “most important” element in the process as we built the ENERG guide narrative and brand identity. A very important element of the diagram to completing our work was the collaborative gear, which is central to the entire process. This spirit of collaboration has been at the heart of the partnership between CSP and Fresh Energy, and it is an imperative of the work of this project. For example, we know that the ENERG Guide is only useful to the extent that it is informed by the target audiences that we hope to assist. However, this project is no longer just a CSP/Fresh Energy only collaboration. We have ignited at least 3-4 other community groups and collaborations to not only contribute to helping us socialize the guide, but we have partners who want to contribute to ongoing resources for our end users of property dwellers and property owners. Through having these discussions we’re increasing collective understanding, we’ve identified more needs and we are beginning to generate ideas. Policy development is also a collaborative process we’ll continue coordination and shared responsibility to advance conversations with key decision makers.

Other key elements of Community Innovation

Although perhaps implicitly included in elements like “Inclusive” and “Collaborative,” the most instrumental elements to advancing our work were “Patience” and “Flexibility.” It was critical for this project to not only ensure that underrepresented voices understood the project and felt heard through our work, but that the project partners understood and felt heard as well. There were moments where partners disagreed on potential approaches to advancing the project, or did not have a mutual understanding of desired outcomes. In these moments, patience and flexibility were key. Both CSP and Fresh Energy are learning and growing together, and while we realize that it will not always be easy, we recognize that we have established a deep level of organizational trust and that together we can achieve far more than we could alone. We achieved this because of relationship building. While it is noted collaboration in the diagram, it has been instrumental in our process and perhaps needs a greater call out. People drive processes and make them replicable. This work would not have happened as efficiently as it did without stellar relationships and relationship building skills.

Progress toward an innovation

We are closer now than when we started for now we have a brand identity of the ENERG guide to as a tool to build housing and energy equity in Saint Paul. Along with the identity is a brand narrative and story that centers around the property as the mutual asset between dwellers and owners. We have framed the dynamic and relationship of people differently by erasing historical negativity and ugly power and privilege connotations of landlord and tenant by updating our language to be inclusive and power neutral. We have centered the work around the property as a mutual asset for both our target audiences. This comes through in our visual and in the narrative. We have built a digital home and an actual “hub” for resources and information in the future as a direct result of the community input to the process. We believe this assures the ability to level this work in the future. We have moved toward a more central system of resources for energy efficiency. The ENERG guide and community outreach is laying the groundwork for a regenerative conversation among property dwellers and property owners focused on the shared benefits of improved energy efficiency in rental housing.

What it will take to reach an innovation?

We did not secure the policies we aimed to pass during this grant period, although we worked to secure support from key decision makers, including staff at the Department of Safety and Inspections, Department of Planning and Economic Development, and City Councilmembers Mitra Jalali Nelson and Jane Prince. To reach the breakthrough needed to secure these policies, we would need to bring additional voices to the table, likely including utilities, housing advocates, and building owners to voice support for the policies. We would also need the political will within the City to introduce and advance the policies, which was a significant challenge throughout the duration of this grant period.

For the ENERG guide, we are in need of customizing the information by segment, meaning customized materials. With deeper and more targeted insight gathering, we can tailor the information to our audience and begin to ask next level energy questions of the community, policymakers and residents with materials that are culturally competent, accessible and work to form solutions to real situations in energy and housing that put people at risk.

What’s next?

We are actively building our next phase of the work and seeking funding partners to support it which includes building more targeted energy resources, mapping out decision making by segment and solution. We are outlining a community socialization strategy and looking to add a resource to keep the ENERG guide digital home up-to-date with the latest information on energy efficiency for property dwellers and property owners. This work will take skills and support in communications, organizing and serving directly property dwellers and property owners so that we are continuously evaluating the effectiveness of the ENERG guide. We will continue exploring opportunities to advance our policy ideas with the City. The City’s draft Climate Action Plan, released earlier this year, includes a possible strategy to explore a time-of-rent energy disclosure policy, which is one of the policies that we hoped to secure through this project. We believe that the City’s willingness to explore this policy is due in large part to our internal conversations with the City, as well as the passage of a similar policy in Minneapolis, which CSP and Fresh Energy supported and testified for.

If you could do it all over again…

The need to develop the narrative while crafting the toolkit, instead of trying to piece the narrative in the toolkit after it’s been built, would have given it more depth. So much of the evolution in bringing the issues of housing, energy, climate and health together is breaking down the assumptions about one another, which is demonstrative in the way that Fresh Energy and CSP have collaborated on this project. But the importance of narrative for building the interest of an issue for people to engage with is critical. Engaging a communications strategist earlier in the grant cycle could have helped us shape and articulate our work both within our partnership and externally in community.

Also, it is good to note from the outset for our potential policy developments the importance of working to identify political allies and pathways to move ordinances and ideas forward. Building relationships with key decision makers both political and community leaders to cement a foundation for this project would have been helpful to our understanding of the landscape of energy burden and the affordable housing crisis.

One last thought

We would love the opportunity to meet with our grant officer Wally Osman to show the progress that has been made on this project from the website and brand identity to sharing stories of the community input gathering sessions.