interviews
Where Will We Go From Here?
by Lauren Schandevel
April 6, 2020
This interview with Lauren Schandevel, the Macomb County Organizer for We the People - Michigan, a non- profit started in 2017 with the mission to build multiracial working class alliances across the state through community organizing, was conducted and condensed by frank news.
Lauren | I came on last year in June. [Organizing] is an interesting thing to try to grapple with and understand and explain to people. So I think it's taken me some time to figure out what exactly my role is in my community. It is also due to the fact that I went back to the community, I grew up in.
frank | What does your community look like?
Macomb County is an area just North of Detroit.
It's pretty blue collar. It's sort of famous for being an Obama to Trump district. It is where the term Reagan Democrats was coined. It’s very reliant on the auto industry.
I grew up in Warren, which is the biggest city in Macomb county. Warren is in the Southern part of Macomb County, it tends to be a little poorer and a little more diverse than the rest of the County. I try to focus most of my work on that part of the County, because that is where the most people are and also where people are poorer and it's easier to organize people with their material interests in mind.
How would you explain the work of an organizer, and the outcomes you’re after?
The goals vary by region [for We The People - Michigan]. We have organizers in different parts of the state. Our West Michigan organizer is focused on a campaign to allow undocumented immigrants to have driver's licenses. While our Northern Michigan organizers are working on a lot of energy, environmental, and indigenous rights work up there.
The direction I'm moving in is to build a more cohesive sense of community here in Macomb County. It's a suburb, and it has all of the trappings of a suburb, which includes isolation – people are not trusting or talking to their neighbors. But there's that added layer of people also being poor and needing help.
I am focused on community building and political education to create a stronger sense of community and belonging. From there people can advocate for their own needs.
Mechanically that looks like having one on one meetings, determining what people are working on, connecting them to people who are doing similar work, and supporting community groups as they arise. [Also] looking for opportunities to work around issues in the community.
For example, there was a spill a few months back that was like a cocktail of hexavalent chromium, cyanide, and PFAS, it spilled onto one of our nearby highways and ended up in some of the waterways. Identifying opportunities like that to pull people in to advocacy work or organizing.
Right. It's one thing in normal circumstances, but what does it look like now? How do you organize in isolation?
Yeah, I mean that's the question.
Have you figured it out in the last 10 days or what?!
[Laughing] Yeah, I've been at it for a couple of weeks. We started working remotely a little over two weeks ago.
In Macomb County specifically, I've been pulling together contacts that I already have here. We have a call every week with someone in our Congressman’s office, one person from the county health department, and a bunch of community members. People talk about projects they're thinking about launching. There are a couple of folks who want to do a seedlings project where they're planting seeds, growing them, and giving them out to people in the community when the supply chain is disrupted, if people don't have food or can’t afford food. People will talk about what they're thinking about, what they’re working on, and solicit advice. People who are interested in doing that work with them can be connected to them.
In addition to that, We The People - Michigan, is a part of a coalition of organizations called MI COVID Community. They are making policy demands to elected officials and thinking through what advocacy looks like during this. How do we get these demands met? Those are the big things for now. I like to think about the work as separate buckets: an advocacy bucket and a mutual aid bucket.
Can you talk about those two buckets?
Mutual aid is a term that's been thrown around a lot the last couple of weeks, but I think it originated in anarchist circles. It basically is the idea of communities taking care of each other and leveraging resources within the community to help each other – but it started explicitly as an alternative to capitalism. The way that people are using it right now is neighbors helping each other, which is fine and also builds power and alternative structures. If it's something that becomes a little bit more mainstream, I think that's a good thing. But I'm not an anarchist so I wouldn't know.
For me, doing mutual aid here has been figuring out what the needs are, identifying gaps in services, and then figuring out ways to meet those needs. It's really hard to develop a volunteer network where people are going out and doing things, when people can't go out and do things.
For now, that has looked like emulating some of the things that are happening in other parts of the state. For example, people are putting out newsletters to community members, talking about what resources are available in the community, what volunteer opportunities exist, figuring out ways to build community through that first correspondence.
Other communities have set up Google Voice Numbers for people to call if they need help. And so I think more creative digital strategies will emerge and people will start really getting the hang of doing this work remotely. But it's very beginning stages.
I'm working right now to pull together a newsletter with a couple of County residents just to keep everyone informed and aware of what resources are available and volunteer opportunities. That's the mutual aid bucket, which is focused on meeting people's immediate needs.
Then there's the advocacy bucket. Focusing on how this moment is, in a way, a window of opportunity to advocate for some of the things that we've wanted for a really long time, including paid sick leave and Medicare For All. Being strategic in how we do that advocacy and tie it to this current moment is really important.
I know there's a group in Michigan called Mothering Justice, which had paid sick leave on the ballot in the last election we had, it passed, and then it was repealed during our lame duck session in the legislature. They're looking to mount that campaign again and bring that back.
Apart from the actual advocating for issues – it’s, what does this political moment mean? I think at any point in history where you have massive economic devastation, there's always a choice made between two visions of the future. Either you're going to choose potential fascism, or a more progressive left-wing vision for what our country could look like.
I think when America emerges from the pandemic, and people are in really dire economic conditions, there's going to be a lot of competing rhetoric. We are going to hear a lot of scapegoating of China and of immigrants and of Asian Americans and of whoever else. People are going to be susceptible to that. Which is why it's so important on the left, to build a proactive counter argument to that, and make the case for inclusive economic justice that points the finger at the real enemies, which are corporations and rich people and shitty politicians.
There will be a rhetorical battle when this is over, which will really determine what direction the nation swings.
It's important to be proactive about what narratives we're putting out. Because if we don't put anything out, people are going to subscribe to the thing that they hear repeatedly, which is this right wing narrative, present before COVID, that says your economic conditions are so dire because of the immigrants taking your job and the people of color who are on welfare and the countries like China who are like stealing our jobs. That sort of stuff. We are going to see a lot more scapegoating, and we have to be really mindful of that and be really aggressive and combative.
Have your goals as an organizer shifted in terms of national electoral politics?
My job has never been organizing around electoral campaigns, so my work really hasn't changed in that way. The approach I like is thinking globally and acting locally.
I do organizing here and try to build community here and build trust and build power for people to fight for the things that they need and want with the knowledge that this strategy can be applied more broadly.
It's really a case study in human behavior doing this sort of work. As I learn more and more about how, particularly working class people, who I grew up with and consider myself a part of, how we think and how we respond to certain strategies organizers use, how we respond to political education and community building activities, is important and applicable for building a larger working class movement that cuts across race and ethnicity and geographic location, and can actually build meaningful power in this country.
How can people get involved?
There's that mutual aid route people have been taking. You're seeing networks arise all over the place. Even in places where mutual aid networks didn't exist before. A lot of these groups are pretty public on social media. There have been Facebook groups that have emerged in Michigan that are specific to a region. And a lot of it is just like resource exchange. If people are thinking through more robust volunteer opportunities, like delivering food and supplies to people and figuring out how to grow food for folks you could also probably find those people through those social media platforms.
Then there's the advocacy side of things. There are a lot of campaigns mounting from this, including campaigns for rent strike, and campaigns that have doubled down on the need for universal healthcare. Because we're all working remotely, those have been pretty accessible. And a lot of folks have switched over to virtual meetings.
I know groups like Sunrise have had a series of webinars that folks can sign up for. Every night they have training online you can attend to get a better sense of how climate activism and COVID fit into each other. I know there are lots of national and local groups that have done similar things where they've been hosting public meetings and webinars and trainings for people virtually.
What is the most urgent advocacy work? Specifically in an area like yours.
The rent strike, in the way that I've heard it used, is basically advocating for a rent freeze. A lot of folks can't afford their rent anymore. I think that's probably necessary work that needs to happen here. In Macomb County, especially because the Southern part has a lot of rental properties, and a lot of evictions, and a lot of foreclosures. A lot of that could be mitigated, hopefully through a rent strike if we're very thoughtful about it, although that's not something that I'm really planning for right now.
In Macomb County in particular, we have an older population. A lot of them live alone. A lot of them aren't on social media. One thing we've been thinking through that's pretty specific to this community is how we get the word out to those people and disseminate information to them, if we can't do it virtually, and we also can’t interact with them in person. Thinking through what flyering could look like, or what safe door to door delivery could look like, and it’s something we're still grappling with. Some of the most vulnerable folks are people who aren't very well connected as it is to their neighbors.
Have any of the tactics you've been deploying right now worked better than others?
I put together a Facebook page called Metro Detroit COVID 19 Support which has probably been the most useful and popular tactic I've tried. It’s basically a place for people in Metro Detroit to offer and ask for resources. Leveraging existing relationships, and pulling people into virtual meetings together so they can cross pollinate ideas has also been really useful. The last couple of weeks have been the strategizing phase of things. And I've just now started to try things with people in my community who are also starting to try things. I don't think we'll know what is really effective for a few more weeks, until after we actually try it and evaluate it.
What’s underreported right now?
It's really important, if we're talking about what work looks like in Michigan, to also connect with some of the organizers in Detroit, which was hit really, really hard by Coronavirus, because of all of the health issues and environmental issues that existed before the virus. There are a lot of people who have been doing work around those issues for a really long time who can speak to that. Particularly folks who are doing advocacy around the water shutoffs.
In 2014, 2015 Detroit started shutting off the water of people who couldn't pay their water bills.
That was also happening in Macomb County, but nationally it was talked about in terms of it happening in Detroit because that was where it was most prevalent. At the beginning of the crisis, in early March, our governor announced a moratorium on water shutoff which was great, but it also meant that people who had had their water turned off already still needed to get it back on.
There was quite a backlog because the city had three plumbers on staff who were turning people's water back on and they just weren't moving fast enough. So folks in Detroit, like Monica Lewis Patrick from We The People of Detroit (which is different from my organization and I know it’s confusing), folks from The People's Water Board, Nayyirah Shariff from Flint Rising were basically tirelessly both pestering the governor to mandate that water be turned back on and do a statewide moratorium, and also delivering water to residents who didn't have water through their taps. That is one snapshot of myriad issues that Detroit has faced and has contributed to the influx of COVID cases there. A lot of those are environmental and public health related. I think if I were to point you in a direction of where to get a better sense of what's going on, it would be with some of those organizers and activists.
Have you found yourself asking any new questions – questions you weren’t asking 6 weeks ago?
I also have all of the very nit-pinky questions about the virus itself and how scared I should be of it and how I protect myself. I totally get that.
From the standpoint of an organizer, a couple of questions I've had and haven't really had answered because there is no answer right now is, what does this mean for my community and the nation and the world? How do we use this moment to turn things around and fight for more equitable and just policies and to fight for a better world, a world that's more prepared to deal with something like this, but also can deal with it more equitably? How do we develop a robust social safety net for our most vulnerable? How do we see the humanity in people who are poor or incarcerated or undocumented and instill that in people so that this doesn't happen? Those are all questions that are emerging for me.
Where are we going and how do we ensure it’s better than this?
It's a huge moment for compassion and empathy. But it’s also a blatant example of systemic and institutional failures. Will those two overlap politically?
Oh my God, that's a great and important question. And I hope I can do it justice in my answer. I think that people are starting to make the connection in more subtle ways, right? I am also checking Twitter and seeing people say, “we are housing folks who are homeless now, we could have done that this entire time.” Or you know, “we're providing free public transportation. We could have done that this whole time.” Realizing that a lot of these problems existed because people didn't have the political will to make solutions happen. I do think, though, that we need to be really adamant and proactive and strategic about how we're making those connections for people.
That's why I say that this is an opportunity to really start fighting for the things that we've always wanted and needed because there's clearly a story here about how our institutions failed everyone because they're stacked against poor folks and in favor of wealthy folks. But if we're not telling that story, someone else will tell a different story. Being really intentional about crafting a narrative about what went wrong during this crisis, why it went wrong, who is responsible and then applying it to some of our other fights like universal healthcare and paid sick leave. But I think especially this ties in well to something like climate change where it does impact everyone, but it impacts them unequally. Because people have access to resources that mitigate some of the effects of it.
I read something the other day saying this will be the death of celebrities. Detachment from the real world has never been so apparent.
Yes – most obvious to people is the testing disparities. People are seeing celebrities with no symptoms getting tested and then they're seeing their loved ones dying and not being able to get tests or treatments. That is a very staunch example of what that inequality looks like. And it's really affirming for me, because I was already railing against these things before this happened. And now it feels like more people are sort of flocking to my corner and I welcome it.
That's nice. It's nice to feel welcome. There is sometimes a fear of when something clicks and you're like, shit, somebody has been telling me about this for 10 years and I haven't really realized until now.
It feels less good to be right than you would think, doesn’t it?
It reminds me a lot of the 2016 election when folks were like, Oh my God, this is so fucked up. We need to do something. I think a lot of people think that Trump is like the worst thing to ever happen to America, when there were all of these issues that existed before, and precipitated the rise of Trump – he wasn't just an anomaly. I think about this moment like that. Like there are things that people have been talking about for a really long time, like the importance of a universal healthcare system, and how unequally resources are allocated in this country. And this is a very stark example of that. And it's a very dramatic, awful thing that had to happen for people to see that. It's very similar to how I think a lot of people thought about Trump's election.
interviews
How FICO Limits Clean Energy
by Forrest Watkins
December 15, 2019
How do you, as a company, define energy democracy?
For us, energy democracy is really about giving power over our energy systems back to everyday people. We know that for the whole history of the energy industry, the benefits and the impacts of energy systems have been very unevenly distributed. Low-income communities and communities of color have confronted the worst impacts of pollution from energy and industry – to the extent that a 2017 study showed that the very structure of our cities has been informed by which sectors of the city are downwind, and where the pollution will blow and have the most impact.
To this day, there are millions of people that lack access to electricity. Even in places where we think of our electric grids as robust and well-developed, like in the U.S., low-income households frequently experience energy poverty, where they don't necessarily have the money to adequately heat their homes. And this has real impacts on people’s health and livelihoods, especially those of children and families.
When we're working on energy democracy, we’re trying to ensure that the next iteration of our energy systems can reverse that dynamic, and really put the people that have been marginalized in fossil-fueled energy systems, at the core of the transition to clean energy.
On a practical level, that means that when we're building out solar and wind energy infrastructure, we need to make sure that low-income communities, communities of color, are included in the benefits of those energy projects, and equally importantly, that they have a say in the development of those projects. When there's a project going into our communities, whether it's a solar project or a gas pipeline, we really need to make sure they have a say in how that develops, and whether it's developed in the first place.
Finally, it's worth calling out that movements for clean energy and environmental protection have pretty consistently undervalued the needs and objectives of communities of color, low-income communities and other marginalized people. Movements for energy democracy and environmental justice, on the other hand, has been led by these communities, from Afton, North Carolina in 1982 to present-day groups like PUSH Buffalo, Greenlining Institute, and campaigns like the Portland Clean Energy Initiative.
Why do you think there's such a lack of understanding about where our energy comes from and how the grid functions?
I think it’s the same thing with a lot of the really important, complex issues that we’re facing today. I care a lot about energy and have worked really hard over the last few years to do what I can to contribute to equity in the space, but I don't necessarily have the same level of understanding on agriculture, or on health systems.
But I also don't know that in-depth policy and resource understanding is necessary to increasing democratic control. If we build the transition to clean energy on the idea that everyone has to understand regional power markets, or utility resource planning schemes, or different regulatory processes, then I don't know if we're going to get there. But if we can give people an opportunity to say, "Yes, I want the choice to participate in this renewable energy program." Or, "Yes, I think if you have the chance to build out more renewable energy in the coming years, you should include that in your resource planning." There's lots of ways we can take the incredible public support for renewable energy, and translate it into smart policies that shape the future of energy.
How do you engage the unengaged in a conversation about transitioning away from a system they’re used to, and might not mind?
Solstice does a lot of the direct engagement in getting people signed up for local, community-shared solar arrays. We know what people are thinking about when they're making these decisions. What we see is people might have different motivations for supporting renewable energy, but they really, overwhelmingly support clean energy, and they don’t want to wait. For some people, it is a climate motivation, or making a more sustainable energy system. Other people, it's not that. Some people say, "I don't believe in climate change," or, "I don't believe that humans are even having an effect on the climate. But solar just makes sense, because it's less expensive, and it gives us more independence in your energy supply.” For some it's about that, the cost savings of energy independence
I think for us, when we’re thinking about our impact, we really want to engage with everyone in the transition to renewable energy, regardless of their specific motivations for it. When it comes down to it, I think people have heard this is the right way to go economically as well as environmentally. When we get on the phone with them, or are at the town hall events with them, it's not something where we have to do a tremendous amount of convincing.
Energy democracy is really tied to clean energy. But the move towards clean doesn't necessarily have to incorporate the ideals of energy democracy. There is a version of this that's corporate, and the power structures won’t change. Why is discussing power, when talking about energy, important?
What we've seen so far in the solar industry, though, is that the early adopters who are able to make these decisions, are generally people with higher income, and the time to shop around and make a good investments decision. In many states, a lot of the wind and solar deployment is being driven by big, investor-owned utilities.
It can be argued that this is the most economically efficient way of rolling out clean energy, but we also know from a few centuries of hard data who benefits from an energy system that’s built that way - and who is marginalized. When we build at a scale that serves a community, and we create spaces for input on the project from the community, that’s how we fit the project to their needs and priorities, and make sure that it’s developed in an equitable way.
When you're building at that scale, it also increases the resiliency of the grid. If you have a more decentralized system with more local power generation, that's a way of reducing the risk for local communities, and making them more resilient to larger impacts. As we're looking at cases like California and Puerto Rico, if our goal is to get the power back on sooner for communities regardless of their economic or racial makeup, inclusive, community-scale solar is a great path to creating an energy system that is resilient not just for the people able to invest in a rooftop array, but also those who aren't.
And how does this all work in practice?
Community solar allows people to enroll in a local solar array and see credits on their energy bill as if they had the array on their own rooftop. Solstice typically uses a subscription model, because it allows people to participate without any upfront payment. So we’ll look at your utility payment history, and how your energy bill has fluctuated over time. That allows us to adjust the allocation size for your energy needs. Once that energy project's turned on, you will start seeing credits on your utility bill. Those credits will more or less zero out your energy bill, and you pay for that energy, but at a discounted rate. The typical discount that we see is about 10%.We advocate for contracts that let the customer pass the subscription on to another customer, should they have to move, or have to cancel their subscription for whatever reason. That just allows for everyone to participate, whether they're renters, or other people that have higher levels of mobility.
At Solstice, we don't develop the projects ourselves. We work with the people that develop and finance the solar projects, we help them get people signed up for the projects, then manage people’s experience, and their allocations, on an ongoing basis. We have a software platform that integrates this with utilities systems to manage the billing process and give people ongoing information about how much they're saving, how much their piece of the solar garden is contributing to carbon reductions, things like that.
We also have invented the EnergyScore, an alternative way of qualifying people for community solar farms that is more accurate in predicting people’s utility bill payment behavior and more inclusive of low-to-moderate income households than the FICO credit scores that are typically used to qualify people for projects. Our goal is really to make it as easy as possible for everyone to participate in these projects, regardless of their background, or how they're coming to the table.
How do you charge people, and decide the value of what that energy is worth?
There's a number of different ways people are approaching this. What we advocate for, is doing a direct percentage discount, because that is really the best way of protecting the customer and making sure they are seeing a discount, no matter what. There are legislated programs of community solar in 18 states, and the 19th, New Mexico, is likely to pass a bill before long. In those 18 states, currently, there is legislative program that allows for automatic bill crediting and the administration of these programs. Under those, people automatically see the utility bill credits that allow them to see savings at the end of the month.
Do you work outside the grid, or through the grid?
We work through the grid. There are definitely some exciting things happening in the microgrid space. At this point, they still have a fairly limited set of use cases because the economics often don’t allow people to save. But in some cases, like with off-grid communities, or organizations like hospitals that really need a high degree of reliability and resiliency, it can make financial sense for them to do that. As far as community solar goes, we’re operating through the traditional grid, and that makes the most financial sense in a lot of ways, not having to reinvent the whole grid system, but just adapting it to meet the new reality.
As energy storage becomes cheaper over the next decade and demand response technologies become more sophisticated, the line between on-grid community solar and off-grid microgrids will likely start to blur. In many places, this will make it increasingly difficult to restrict the decentralization and democratization of energy.
Can the grid handle a transition away from coal and gas, to wind and solar?
There are a lot of smart people working on that question.
But in the long term, we know having a more decentralized grid makes for better resilience, and more reliability. Utilities are not always the most popular among everyday people, or people in the solar industry. But they are really good at keeping the lights on, and managing the grid, which is an incredibly complex system. This is the direction we need to be heading regardless, and a lot of the brainpower going into this transition will happen at that level too.
Regulators also have an important role in shaping utilities’ incentives to make this energy transition while also maintaining affordability and reliability. Changing utilities’ incentive structures is vital, so they’re not just paid high returns for continuing to build huge, centralized generation plans, and instead paying them to make the changes that serve their constituents, like transitioning to a cleaner, more decentralized generation, and upgrading software systems to maintain grid security and make crediting and billing systems run more smoothly and with less overhead expense.
So it's definitely something that will require transition, but I think is on its way. We're already seeing some utilities really get on board. As I said here are 18 legislated community solar programs. But there are 42 states that have at least one community solar garden. Those states where it’s not legislated are where the utility is taking the initiative, and they're doing this because it's a way for them to control that transition a little bit more. Instead of just having people put up projects wherever they want, or having to manage an increase in energy over their lines - from a neighborhood with a lot of solar, for example - they can choose to site a community solar array right next to their distribution infrastructure. They get to plan it out themselves, and often save on upgrades in the transmission system.
You mentioned the idea of decentralizing the grid, as the thing driving some of this change. Some critics point out decentralizing as a security risk. Is that something that you talk about?
I've heard some of the big utilities make the argument that increasing the number of people who are involved in this system - people like third party generators - may increase some cyber security risks on their end. I definitely trust that they know what they’re talking about, but growing data systems and the risk associated with that is a reality across many industries, and there are certainly ways to mitigate data security concerns. As an organization that is working with large energy companies on software for community solar gardens, I can tell you there are a lot of strict standards around data and software security that we have to deal with.
I think it’s also worth pointing out, though, that at the end of the day, if you end up with a system that is more decentralized, and what they call islandable, where basically, you could take a local energy grid, if the larger grid goes down for whatever reason, and power the local grid in a town, or a county, at a localized level, then you’re actually better off in terms of the resiliency of the overall grid, because it's harder to just hit one large piece of the grid, and take the whole thing down.
What policy needs to exist to make your work sustainable, profitable, compelling, incentivizing, etc.?
We do work at a state and local level because that's where we are seeing a lot of movement and innovation on the policy front. Solstice was founded to get as many people access to clean energy as possible.
Community solar addresses some of those needs, but there's also a whole set of barriers on the financial side. There are a lot of people that could theoretically get solar in some way, but who don't have the FICO credit scores, or the upfront savings to be able to participate.
One of the areas we focus on most closely are financial and policy innovations that empower those communities to participate. We are working under funding from the Department of Energy to develop an alternative to FICO, that's more specific to needs of community solar. We talk to people every day to try to get them connected to projects and so many have been paying their energy bill on time for decades, and just don't quite have a FICO credit score of 650 or 700 that they need to sign up. The people who are putting up the money for the projects would rather keep their risk low, and they see people with a FICO score below 650 or 700 as potentially to risky.
What we need to do is gather the data to show them otherwise, to show that someone who pays their bill on time every month is likely to pay their bill on time every month with a 10% discount.
We want to make something more accurate in saying, not can we rely on you to pay your mortgage, but will you pay your community solar bill on time? So we’ve come up with the EnergyScore, a machine-learning algorithm based on over half a million customer utility records. As I said, we've taken that aggregate data and made it into something that is both more accurate, in predicting people's future utility bill payment behavior, and more inclusive of low-income communities. We’re now testing it out in pilots in New York, and proving it out in a real-world context and using the data we collect to improve it, and we’ll be scaling it across the country in the coming years.
On the policy side, we're active in advocating for community solar programs, ones that will allow for third-party participation, for community-led solar projects, but also for policies that really encourage innovation on the inclusion front. Kelly Roache, our Director of Inclusion, has done amazing work building consensus between environmental and energy justice advocates like PUSH Buffalo and the NY Energy Democracy Alliance, as well as people in the solar industry, to push for policies that support financial inclusion, and that directly address the issue of finance. Two victories that Solstice has been a part of advocating for are winning a $21M pool of grant funding and a loan-loss reserve, and both of those went to support pilots innovating on low-income inclusion.
Our hope is that with this in place, we can work with communities in New York to prove that low-income folks can and should be full participants in the transition to clean energy, and scale that approach across the country.