The Final Five Years: Accelerating the Work of Others

In 2019, seeking to accelerate and leverage its impact, the Board decided to deploy PECI’s $4.3 million in remaining assets by supporting and expanding effective policy and programmatic work led by partner Northwest non-profit organizations. The goal was to advance climate and clean energy-related efforts, especially in Oregon, with a focus on recognizing the importance of equity and climate justice as new laws are created and new programs implemented. After researching the potential for the greatest impact in various sectors, the Board focused its investments in four action areas:

1. Decarbonizing transportation
2. Reducing the climate impact of buildings
3. Supporting capacity in organizations focused on environmental justice (EJ) and policy
4. Increasing EJ- and climate-focused engagement with the Oregon Public Utility Commission (OPUC)

To ensure its investments supported strategies that earned strong alignment among NGO’s in the region, PECI primarily invested in organized coalitions of groups working together to impact the focus areas. In addition to these four focus areas, the Board also selected some tactical grant opportunities to support efforts related to these policy topics. Below is an overview of the significant policy, equity, and coalition-building achievements of PECI grantees.

PECI’s investments in transportation decarbonization amounted to approximately $750,000 over a three-year period. This was an important component of a broader fundraising effort. In one example year (2020-2021), PECI’s investment was on par with that of four other leading funders, with the total across all funders amounting to over $1 million.

PECI supported a coalition including Climate Solutions, Forth, Oregon Environmental Council and Verde, working together toward clean and equitable transportation for Oregonians. With this and other support, the team brought together dozens of other transportation-related groups, forming the Clean and Just Transportation Network to pursue policy advancement on the interconnected topics of transportation, justice, climate change, and safety.

To organize efforts in this broad topic area, the network developed two workgroups. The Transportation Electrification team’s work eventually set the stage for multiple major policy success, including adoption of the Clean Cars Rules (I & II) and the Clean Trucks Rules, and an organized effort to encourage the Oregon Department of Transportation to increase its prioritization of EV charging, equity, and other concerns in its planning and budgets.

The other workgroup, focused on Transportation Funding, educated community, NGO, and political leaders on the challenging issues surrounding long-term funding for Oregon’s transportation system. The group aligned to encourage ODOT to consider more equitable and climate-smart uses of federal funds. In addition, they set the stage for these considerations to gain more traction in a major transportation policy package, which is expected in 2025.

These workgroups, and the CJTN’s broader efforts, helped lay the foundation for other transportation policy wins, including bills related to 1) medium and heavy-duty charging, 2) medium and heavy-duty EV Truck purchase incentives, 3) investments in school bus electrification, and 4) the successful campaign to make Oregon’s Clean Fuels Program significantly stronger and more effective. Overall, these and other efforts helped Oregon achieve the second highest EV adoption rate in the country.

Over a four-year period, PECI granted nearly $600,000 for policy work to address energy efficiency and renewable energy use affecting the climate impact of buildings. These investments were made to a coalition of nonprofits working to put all buildings in Oregon on the path to net zero energy use, through collaboration in the Zero Energy Ready Oregon (ZERO) coalition. The coalition included Earth Advantage, New Buildings Institute, Climate Solutions, and NW Energy Coalition as the core partners.

The group’s work influenced policies in a range of venues from the Building Codes Division to the Public Utility Commission, to preparation for legislative efforts. As an example, the team’s combined knowledge and policy capacity led to strong engagement in PUC conversations. These were dubbed the ‘Future of Gas’ dockets and considered the role of natural (methane) gas in buildings, and the pathways to decarbonize these energy needs. The group’s capacity and relationships also connected to support strong engagement in rulemaking for Oregon’s Climate Protection Program, as well as continued defense of the program.

This alliance and other efforts laid the policy groundwork for a campaign to establish Reach Codes in 2021 and 2022 that would have allowed cities to opt into a shared higher efficiency requirement for new buildings. Following legislative pushback on those policies, the legislature instead formed the REBuilding Task Force to develop workable policy approaches. Experts among PECI grantees participated in this critical effort. The task force led to the development of the Resilient, Efficient Buildings Package that included four bills. Driven by leading legislators and supported by dozens of advocacy groups in the Building Resilience campaign, the package was a major climate and justice victory in 2023.

In 2020, PECI launched a ‘Frontline Community-led Policy Initiative’ to support new climate- and justice-related capacity in BIPOC-led and community-based organizations throughout Oregon. The initiative invested more than $1 million to support three-year capacity grants, which funded a new climate justice position in each grantee organization. In general, PECI provided funding for 100 percent of the total cost of the position in Year One, 75 percent in Year Two, and 50 percent in Year Three. Participating organizations included APANO, Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians (ATNI), the Coalition of Communities of Color (CCC), the Portland African American Leadership Forum (PAALF) which later became Imagine Black, Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste (PCUN), and Verde.

This investment and subsequent hiring wave enabled these leading organizations to bring a marked increase in environmental justice voices available to support policy conversations, education work, and partnerships, and was one of many ingredients supporting a shift in power dynamics across the region’s policy landscape. This EJ policy capacity also became an important force supporting the groundwork for the Oregon Clean Energy Opportunity campaign, which led to passage of the 100% Clean Energy policy (HB2021). This included strong community and labor benefits, and required Oregon’s investor-owned electric utilities to supply 100 percent non-greenhouse gas-emitting power by 2040.

Building on these capacity-building successes, PECI also made focused grants to the Northwest Native Chamber and Verde to support their participation in a steering committee that will help direct the work of a coalition bringing the benefits of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (within the Inflation Reduction Act) to communities throughout Oregon.

In consultation with leading policy organizations, PECI identified the Oregon Public Utility Commission (OPUC) as an increasingly important decision-making venue for climate- and justice-related policies. Bolstering the opportunity, OPUC had noted its own ambition to increase access for BIPOC and other historically marginalized voices, and invested in staffing and process improvements to support the improved openness.

To launch this engagement effort, NW Energy Coalition (NWEC) worked with Verde, Community Energy Project, Rogue Climate, and the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission (CRITFC) as a core team, along with other leading policy groups and supporters, to build a plan to prioritize and engage in key OPUC dockets over a three-year period. PECI invested nearly $700,000 in total over the three years to support the team’s work.

NWEC, along with the Oregon Citizens’ Utility Board (CUB), have for many years led the effort to bring climate and broader public concerns to OPUC. Through this new effort led by NWEC and the core groups listed above, the coalition was able to bring together over a dozen more groups, along with a supported cohort of community members, to actively engage in many different OPUC dockets. As one leading climate activist put it, while apologizing for the military analogy, “It was as if a whole new army had arrived to help!”

The improved community involvement in OPUC processes also meant that utilities stepped up their engagement with advocates, rather than treating their community listening sessions as a check-box item. The work advanced a range of justice topics, such as pricing structures, utility bill forgiveness, wildfire management, and others. The ‘Future of Gas’ docket spurred many new conversations, and led OPUC Commissioners to actually talk about a ‘managed transition from gas.’ In addition, OPUC denied acknowledgement of Northwest Natural’s Integrated Resource Plan, as it failed to present a credible and least-cost approach to meeting emission reduction requirements in the Climate Protection Program. The group continues to work together and push for strong, community-supporting implementation of HB 2021’s ‘100% Clean Energy for All’ legislation.

Along with the efforts of the coalition, this progress was also the result of relentless work by many other leading organizations, including the Oregon Environmental Council, Climate Solutions, and the Green Energy Institute at Lewis and Clark Law School, among many others.

Related Opportunities

While focused primarily on these four major funding areas, PECI’s Board also invested in a handful of other climate and equity advancement opportunities, totaling nearly $600,000 in the five year period. These included:

1. An investment in a joint effort of the Oregon Solar Energy Industry Association (OSEIA) (now known as the Oregon Solar + Storage Industries Association (OSSIA)), the Northwest Energy Coalition (NWEC), and Renewable Northwest (RNW) to develop clean energy and energy efficiency policies, and to engage on regulations at the OPUC.
2. Support for Oregon for Climate Action to advance education and outreach among the business community around climate and carbon pricing policy options. The group’s work helped lay the foundation for Cap and Invest policy pushes in 2019 and 2020.
3. Support for Renew Oregon’s work on policy development, outreach, education, and collaboration around climate policy. While this effort, along with the above work by Oregon for Climate Action, to move toward a Cap and Invest policy was thwarted by the legislative walk-outs of 2019 and 2020, the work contributed significantly to the much broader movement’s support that led to Governor Brown’s Executive Order in March 2020. The Executive Order spurred action among several state agencies, including DEQ’s development of the Climate Protection Plan.
4. Grants in 2021 and 2022 to SEI to support expanding their Climate Corps program into Oregon. The program brought a total of 10 Climate Fellows to six nonprofit organizations, with each rising professional completing a 10-month full-time fellowship. PECI’s $100,000 investment leveraged more than $600,000 in additional funding from West Coast foundations and partners for Climate Corps Fellows in Oregon. Each of the host organizations provided a modest contribution, while SEI (through the various foundation and PECI grants) provided the bulk of the compensation for Fellows. SEI also provided training and leadership development, energy and climate policy education, other professional support, and cohort-building opportunities. In addition, SEI emphasized recruiting emerging leaders of color, and helped several Fellows find permanent employment in clean energy and climate justice policy and program coordinator jobs. As of 2024, the program continues in Oregon and has built on these early successes, now also working with new partner organizations and Portland Public Schools on climate policy and curriculum.