By Yessenia Funes for Atmos.
Broadcast version by Suzanne Potter for California News Service reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

Jessica Celi has lived in the Bay Area for almost her entire life. She spent most of her 20s jumping from industry to industry, trying to find her place in the professional world. She returned to school to specialize in human resources and graduated last year. Then, she was laid off from her first job. That’s when she entered the clean energy job market.

Celi, 30, is just finishing up her 11-month program as a SolarCorps fellow in the Bay Area with GRID Alternatives, a national nonprofit that provides no-cost residential solar installations for eligible low-income households in various regions and also trains locals to provide the service. This year, the organization is expanding its yearslong partnership with the U.S.-run public service agency AmeriCorps to help launch the American Climate Corps, President Joe Biden’s initiative to train and deploy a diverse workforce to, among other things, work in sectors contributing to the clean energy transition. It’s an alternative to the promised Civilian Climate Corps that Democrats axed from his landmark climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, which Biden signed into law two years ago, and Celi is part of the inaugural class. 

“I am part of something bigger, and I do look forward to moving into a career throughout the long term in the renewable industry,” she said.

Two years after the Civilian Climate Corps died in Congress, groups like GRID Alternatives and the AmeriCorps are picking up the mantle to make the president’s vision of a new green workforce a reality. Corps members do all kinds of work—from restoring wetlands to managing forests—but the SolarCorps focuses on deploying solar panel technology in California, Colorado, and Washington D.C. to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions driving the planet’s warming. This year’s SolarCorps cohort at GRID Alternatives has installed solar for over 1,170 families. Since October 2023, the organization has orchestrated some 130 job placements. As the Inflation Reduction Act injects $370 billion toward the clean energy sector through tax credits, grants, and loans, the sector sees a rare opportunity for growth. 

The American Climate Corps includes private and public partners from across the country, from the U.S. Forest Service to Operation Fresh Start, a Wisconsin-based organization that helps young people find career pathways. While the Biden administration didn’t provide the American Climate Corps with its own budget to build this new workforce, the White House is directing agency dollars and grants to invest in AmeriCorps programs already molding the green jobs of tomorrow. 

Some organizations—like GRID Alternatives—are bringing renewable energy to communities of color, low-income communities, and other communities that have historically been excluded or disinvested. President Biden committed to distributing at least 40% of his federal investment benefits to these neighborhoods that need them the most. Programs like the SolarCorps are attempting to realize that goal.

SolarCorps has been working with AmeriCorps since 2006 long before climate became a national priority. Now, the program plans to expand to more states thanks to an infusion of new grant dollars GRID Alternatives secured from the Inflation Reduction Act. The organization has provided paid fellowships to over 300 individuals like Celi to learn how to install solar panels, as well as how to engage with the community.

Celi, for instance, was an outreach fellow. Her fellowship is now ending, but her role involved building a relationship with her Bay Area community by door-knocking, calling, or emailing families that already had their solar panels installed to help them monitor their systems and ensure they know how to use the panels. On Earth Day this year, when Biden kicked off the American Climate Corps, Celi was at Richmond, California’s Unity Park with the rest of GRID’s outreach team, as well as other local community partners, to attract the public to their programs. As Celi saw local families engage with the event’s free bike repairs and free bicycle-powered smoothies, she realized the scope of her work—and how impactful that was. 

“It really felt meaningful to see that we are directly connecting with the community and sharing these resources with one another,” she said. 

After all, Richmond is home to a refinery from fossil fuel polluter Chevron. The industrial facility has been a source of air pollution for the predominantly Hispanic, Black, and Asian community. This is, in part, why GRID has been focused on communities of color, explained Adewale OgunBadejo, vice president of workforce development at the organization. 

“How can we reduce the carbon footprint in the communities that we serve? How can we have less urban oil wells because they’re causing higher incidences and rates of cancer and asthma in these communities that we serve?” he said. “We’re helping our fellows make that environmental connection in a very real way so that as you’re installing and you’re looking at an urban drilling well across the street, you understand that the more solar we can install, the more of those we can remove and create more healthy communities.”

Black, Indigenous, and other people of color bear the brunt of air pollution health impacts from dirty energy sources. In 2023, a group of researchers even coined the term “fossil fuel racism” to highlight the insidious ways the industry harms Black, Brown, Indigenous, and poor populations. Communities of color are also less likely than their white peers to have installed solar panels onto their roofs. That’s where GRID comes in: The program’s solar panel installations from this year’s fellows alone have cut carbon dioxide emissions by over 78,000 tons—or nearly 15,000 cars taken off the road. 

The SolarCorps program doesn’t only focus on bringing solar panels to people of color—it also prioritizes hiring this demographic as fellows, too. Among the past year’s 51 fellows, for instance, 80% identified as Black, Indigenous, or a person of color. Over half were women or nonbinary, 27% identified as LGBTQIA+, and some 26% have been affected by the justice system (mostly through incarceration). At the national level, the solar industry is dominated by white dudes: In 2022, 73% of the workforce was white and 69% male, according to an independent report. Celi, who is Filipino, experienced that diversity disparity firsthand when in January she attended her first industry conference, where, for the first time in her solar work, she was the minority. 

“I’m very proud to have been able to attend and to create that change,” said Celi, who is also a member of Women of Renewable Industries and Sustainable Energy, or WRISE, which is dedicated to cultivating women leaders in the industry.

The SolarCorps fellowship is just a tiny piece of the U.S. government’s wider American Climate Corps. Sociologist Dana Fisher, who is also the author of the book Saving Ourselves, has been researching the existing Corps programs that have been expanding and shifting to include climate change. Many of these adjustments were already in the works before the Biden administration’s formalization of the American Climate Corps. 

Despite the existence of the Climate Corps, there’s no central agency or database tracking the integration of climate change into programs across the U.S. or following the fellows themselves after they complete their service. How many wind up in clean energy jobs? Do they leave these programs with a deeper understanding of how the planet’s rapid warming disrupts society? Fisher’s research on AmeriCorps has so far illuminated the reality that “there is no consensus about how the agency is doing its climate work,” she wrote in a paper published last month. There’s no consistent language used across AmeriCorps programs and, thus, no unified understanding of the climate crisis among program participants and leadership.

Now, Fisher is following the rollout of a handful of programs in Vermont, Maryland, Michigan, and California where she has developed a climate-centric curriculum all of their American Climate Corps members will be required to take when their fellowships begin in September. She will be adding more states to the list later this year. 

Fisher emphasized the need for more federal dollars to go toward analyzing all the varied American Climate Corps programs to assess whether the funding is doing what it’s supposed to do: educating young people (especially young people of color) about the climate crisis and placing them in jobs dedicated to building a cleaner, healthier, more equitable world.

“The infusion of money is absolutely valuable, but it’s impossible for me not to think about this without putting on my social sciences hat,” Fisher said. “The problem is that we don’t know how they’re helping because nobody is actually measuring that, and nobody is there evaluating it.”

GRID’s SolarCorps doesn’t have its own evaluation system, either. The group is working to build that out now that it’s hired a data analyst, OgunBadejo said. They’re hoping to track fellows three to 12 months after they graduate. As the program looks to expand into tribal nations and nearly 30 states like Texas and Michigan over the next few years, OgunBadejo recognizes the need to partner with local groups that know those communities best and can cater the programs to their needs.

With the hundreds of millions of dollars in grants the group has collaboratively received from the Inflation Reduction Act, they plan to work with others and bring their SolarCorps model to even more communities across the country that need access to affordable solar energy and the training to find jobs in the industry, too.

“Our approach as an organization is very holistic,” OgunBadejo said. “We really look at clean energy as a way to address environmental and economic justice.”

For too long, Black and Brown folks have been left out of the clean energy boom. SolarCorps is building an ecosystem where community members have the skills they need to transform their communities for the better—and get paid to do it.


Yessenia Funes wrote this article for Atmos.


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On Election Day, a broad coalition of conservationists, labor, and others helped defeat a ballot initiative to repeal Washington State's Climate Commitment Act. The act, passed in 2021, is the state's state's primary vehicle for reducing emissions and pollution and a major source of funding for clean energy infrastructure and climate initiatives.

Billy Wallace, political and legislative director with the Washington and Northern Idaho District Council of Laborers, said passage would have meant the loss of as many as 45,000 clean-energy jobs.

"We started building a coalition, and it ended up being a little over 600 groups, from labor, from environmental. The Catholic Church was on it, We had 21 of the 29 tribes sign on. So it was a very diversified coalition that came together to save this funding." he said.

Initiative 2117 was one of four ballot measures backed by the Let's Go Washington PAC funded primarily by conservative hedge-fund manager Bryan Heywood. Wallace said that over the next 8 years, Climate Commitment Act investments would create 45,000 jobs in Washington State.

Wallace added the coalition faced an uphill battle to help the public understand that jobs and the environment were both on the line.

"These are the investments, even in schools, clean air, clean water. And once we figured out we got to educate the people on what's going on, it was complicated. It was confusing for the general public. So we raised $18.4 million for this campaign from that big coalition," he continued.

Climate Jobs Washington and its member unions formed a coalition to protect the act. Wallace said labor organizations were instrumental in passing the original measure three years ago.

"It was crucial for our members. Our members work in the building trades. About 75%, 80% of the work we do is on prevailing wage work in transpo[rt]. So it was a no-brainer for us to jump in," he added.

New research finds Maryland leading the nation in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Environmental Protection Agency data show between 2005 and 2022, greenhouse gas pollution fell in 44 states and the District of Columbia. Maryland saw the largest reduction at 36%, followed by D.C., Maine, New Hampshire and Georgia. Only six states saw emissions increase.

Emily Scarr, senior advisor for the Maryland Public Interest Research Group, said the wide variation between states shows local policy matters.

"It's really evidence that states and regions have a lot of control on their greenhouse gas emissions," Scarr explained. "Showing ways that we can continue to reduce emissions, as well as showing warning signs of things that states do that can actually take us in the wrong direction."

The reductions nationwide are largely attributed to the retirement of many coal-fired power plants. Maryland has shuttered seven coal plants since 2012, with two still operating.

The report looks at emissions data from power generation, industry, transportation, agriculture, residential and commercial sectors. Maryland saw emissions reductions in every category except for the commercial sector, which includes commercial buildings, landfills and wastewater treatment centers. Scarr pointed out fossil-fuel-based winter heating is driving emissions in the commercial sector.

"The majority of those emissions are actually coming from heat for commercial buildings," Scarr observed. "That's a specific place where, if properly implemented, the Building Energy Performance Standards can start holding commercial building owners accountable."

The Maryland Department of the Environment will collect energy-use data from buildings larger than 35,000 square feet in 2025, to develop energy performance standards based on those numbers. The state has set a 2040 target for large buildings to have net-zero emissions.


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Community members in Seattle had a unique opportunity to weigh in on the policies guiding the city's climate goals.

In 2019, the City of Seattle passed the Green New Deal Resolution and Green New Deal Executive Order, with the goal of eliminating climate pollution by 2030.

To help guide that process, the initiative's oversight board supported community assemblies.

Peter Hasegawa is the organizing director at MLK Labor and co-chair of the Green New Deal Oversight Board.

He said the idea behind the community assemblies was to do deep listening with many different community members.

"To have the opportunity to present information and get feedback," said Hasegawa, "and have people think about solutions together over a longer period of time, was appealing to us because we thought we could get higher quality feedback."

MLK Labor and Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle hosted the assemblies.

The goal was to ensure that people on the front-lines had their voices heard, and were at the table as the city crafts policies going forward.

Faduma Fido is lab leader with the People's Economy Lab, which helped support the community assemblies.

She said they're piloting this type of engage at the city level because people are tired of going to listening sessions.

She said the assemblies provide a more empowering setting, with people compensated for their time and eating meals together. Fido said they want to bring democratic practices like these back.

"There's an appetite and willingness now to empower the citizens," said Fido, "empower communities to practice democracy beyond the ballot box, because often that tends to be very polarizing."

Hasegawa said they heard from a variety of people over the three sessions.

In the first, they heard about people's experiences being affected by extreme weather, such as the 2021 heat dome, and a freeze last winter that caused many people's pipes to burst.

In the second session, they heard about wins on the ground to protect people and workers from the effects of climate change.

Hasegawa said in the third, they brainstormed about what the city and local labor movement can do about climate change.

"In certain ways that ended up being the easiest session," said Hasegawa, "because there was a very high level of consensus that what workers in Seattle want is to be protected from extreme weather, they want to be protected from heat and smoke, and bursting pipes, and they want to be protected whether they work in a building or outside or in a home."




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