[Reminder: You’re Invited] Community Benefits Plans & Agreements

Sponsored by the Climate Equity Initiative at Clean Air Task Force

Join the Climate Equity Initiative at Clean Air Task Force (CATF) for our third webinar launching three reports on community benefits plans and agreements:

Understanding Community Benefit Plans and the Potential for Change
Community Benefits: A Survey of Perspectives from Three Communities
Community Benefits Agreements: Federal Guidelines, Case Studies, and Best Practices

Achieving a broader, more shared prosperity from the clean energy transition is emerging as a core goal of the federal government under the Biden administration. To advance this goal, the Department of Energy (DOE) has begun requiring funding applicants to research, plan, and commit to comprehensive community, workforce, and equity planning and strategies, termed a “Community Benefits Plan” (CBP).

The Community Benefits Plan (CBP) is a first-of-its-kind effort at a federal agency to leverage the opportunity for significant amounts of federal climate and clean energy funding to encourage an innovative, community-centric approach to development. Pursued with accountability and targeting genuine community-centric results, CBPs could become a tool that equitably boosts jobs, resources, and economic development within specific communities, and helps to shape how the next generation of clean energy technologies are deployed. But given their novelty, there remains a lack of common understanding among developers, communities, and policymakers alike of how to develop and implement an effective CBP that delivers meaningful environmental justice and just transition outcomes.

In this webinar, we will discuss the current state of CBPs, including first-hand reflections from early participants and a survey of community-level understandings of CBPs and various types of benefits agreements, and explore how CBPs may, or may not, be achieving community-centric goals.