The City of Medford has received a grant from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center’s EmPower Massachusetts program to help low-income residents reduce their carbon emissions. Medford received $300,000, the maximum amount they could apply for, from MassCEC.
In an email to the Daily, Lisa Dobbs, program manager at MassCEC, wrote, “Projects funded by the EmPower Program will support the exploration, development, and implementation of a variety of approaches to increasing equity and access to clean energy… Projects are eligible to seek funding under two distinct grant opportunities, Innovation and Capacity Building Grants and Implementation Grants … Implementation Grants provide funding up to $150,000-$300,000 to implement innovative projects and program models that serve the specified priority groups, including [environmental justice] populations and renters.”
Brenda Pike, climate policy staff planner with the City of Medford, shared the city’s plans to educate residents about decarbonization strategies. “We applied for a decarbonization outreach campaign to residents. And so that’s talking to them about the entire gamut of ways they can decarbonize their lives from energy efficiency to electrification, to renewables. The MassCEC grant in particular is really focused on working with communities that have been underserved in the past,” she explained.
Medford Mayor Breanna Lungo-Koehn expressed her excitement about the grant and its anticipated benefits.
“This grant is extremely exciting. It helps us build on the work we’re doing, trying to reach underrepresented populations in our community,” she said. “This is just another step in reaching our underserved populations and residents in Medford who also deserve the ability to get rid of fossil fuels in different ways and reduce reliance on fossil fuels.”
In a press release about the grant, the city stated, “Options will be available for all residents, and EmPower funding will specifically support efforts under the program to reach residents with historically less access to clean energy and energy efficiency programs such as multilingual populations, renters, environmental justice (EJ) communities, and communities impacted by environmental hazards, and will offer stipends for income-eligible participants to aid them in moving forward with projects.”
According to the press release, the grant money will be allotted to the “Electrify Medford” community outreach campaign. Much of it will be used to create stipends for “local energy coaches,” who will speak to residents one-on-one about how they can decarbonize and apply for incentives provided by either the city or by the state of Massachusetts.
According to Pike, the coaches will look at a resident’s specific living situation and provide them with a personalized decarbonization plan. These plans will include suggestions such as making updates to their property, applying for clean energy incentives from the city or state, or purchasing an electric vehicle.
“Those coaches most likely are going to speak a second language … and they’re going to be able to reach populations that we have a hard time reaching other than [through] our connectors and our liaisons,” Lungo-Koehn explained.
Lungo-Koehn discussed several projects that the grant will help fund. One of these is Community Electricity Aggregation, an initiative that works to provide new electricity supply options and more renewable energy to residents and businesses throughout Medford. Other projects the grant will support include installing more electric vehicle charging stations, expanding the city’s Blue Bikes network and installing solar panels on city buildings.
“We’re trying to get people to traverse the city in alternate ways than using a car. And that work sometimes doesn’t go hand in hand with climate work, but it really is linked,” Steve Smirti, Director of Communications, shared. “These projects are aiming towards reducing the city’s climate emissions by 50% by 2030, and then [to] zero emissions by 2050.”
With the grant, Pike hopes to reduce the burden of high energy costs for low-income residents.
“Where you have people with lower income levels, you see higher energy burdens. So they’re paying a higher percentage of their income to their energy bills than people with higher incomes do,” she said.
Pike also encouraged Tufts students to contribute to Medford’s community outreach efforts, as they are uniquely situated to assist those impacted by this program.
“We are still looking for energy coaches, so if there are any Tufts students that are interested in being an energy coach, we would love that,” she said. “One of our target groups that we’re looking to reach with this is renters, so Tufts students would be a great group to be able to reach out through, to get to that community.”
