MEETING NOTES: (you can also see the third attachment)

Attendance (we did longer intros, not recorded here): Matt Kazinka from the Latino Economic Development Center Joe Hesla from Corcoran neighborhood Cheryl Morganspencer from Community Action of Minneapolis Lee Samelson, outreach intern and Whittier Neighborhood resident Troy Benjegerdes from the East Phillips neighborhood Sophie Garcia, outreach intern and East Phillips neighborhood resident Kim Hayden from the East Phillips Neighborhood Timothy DenHerder-Thomas, Our Power Organizer Progress Updates: The campaign has grown steadily, though haphazardly, since the first set of meetings to draft the Community Energy Plan in January-May. This summer, Our Power door-knocked over 1,000 households in the seven neighborhood area and secured over 150 sign-ons through door-knocking, tabling at events, and attending community meetings. The vast majority of these people have taken some initial actions to save energy, whether making small upgrades or behavioral changes in their own house of participating in existing community energy projects. We have also worked with other coalition partners to launch the following projects: The Latino Economic Development Center (LEDC) has started its work engaging Spanishspeaking business owners in green practices, helping them to save energy and money. During the summer, they surveyed 10 Latino-owned restaurants to understand their needs and interests around saving energy, and what the biggest barriers they are facing. This Fall, LEDC is expanding this survey to other sectors other than restaurants and is creating a follow up process to help the businesses they survey to take action to become more green, especially focusing on saving electricity and gas by connecting with the information, resources and service providers that Our Power has identified. Discussions continue with the Lake Street Council, including some new connections with administrators and facilities managers at the Midtown Global Market, Wells Fargo, and the Allina Hospitals that are leading to further planning on how to work together to save energy and create clean energy solutions locally. Community Action of Minneapolis has launched it's STEP program (Steps Towards Energy Payments) that helps residents with chronic energy debt and high energy usage to take action to reduce their energy use and find ways to pay off their energy bills. Community Action also partnered with Our Power on a Community Energy Forum on August 9th to generate feedback on the Community Energy Plan and bring people from all cultural and economic backgrounds together around energy solutions. The East Phillips Improvement Coalition (EPIC) partnered with Cooperative Energy Futures to host a series of energy efficiency workshops for East Phillips residents with a particular focus on renters and non-English speakers. 30 workshops were completed, about half in Spanish, helping residents cut their electricity consumption. Electrical consumption from as low as $20/month for a whole house to as high as $500/month for a small apartment were discovered, highlighting the need to help residents with less understanding and control over their energy usage to take charge. Cooperative Energy Futures has also been working across the

neighborhoods to launch an insulation bulk buying program where neighbors are uniting to insulate their homes as a group and get a discount while ensuring high-quality service. Structure Proposal: We discussed the proposed structure for the Our Power coalition that is described in the first attached document. We walked through the various proposed teams and their functions. We focused particularly on the Advisory Board, since the intention is for it to serve as a representative body with people from all the neighborhoods, cultural groups, and economic backgrounds of the neighborhood making decisions, but most of the formal groups that have been approached have voiced support for the idea but not willingness to commit to (even quarterly) regular meeting participation. This presents a challenge in that the campaign and the coalition are currently being guided by whoever sporadically shows up, rather than by a consistent group that represents the many diverse voices of the community. Joe recommended that we form an interim Advisory Board where people from the community volunteer to serve in a formal role for a short-term basis (3-6 months) to start guiding this work and think ahead to its future, and to make way for a more representative approach with elections or some other formal selection process in the future. Cheryl recommended to just keep doing the work in the meantime and let the representative structure emerge over time into something that really connects to people. Emphasized the importance of making sure that people understand that this is our future and it's happening now. Suggested that maybe when people hear the language of energy efficiency, they turn off/ don't quite get how it ties into energy and economic independence and self determination. Really focus on the message and the frame. Kim said maybe to turn the framing around and focus on how this is about having more to spend on the things we actually care about - healthy food, stronger community, etc. We decided to move forward with Joe's proposal. People generally liked the structure otherwise, especially how it links to actual community groups and provides ways for community members to get involved. Brainstorm: We had an open brainstorm about some other opportunities and ideas that we might want to see come out of it: Minneapolis is renegotiating it's service contract (20 years?) with Xcel Energy in a few years (2014?). Maybe a core strategy could be to work with the City Council to structure this new contract in a way that was much more favorable to community energy and neighborhood energy efficiency efforts. Several people were excited to see this connection with City-wide efforts and want to see it more farther. We should connect in with all the graduates of the RENEW program who have been trained in clean energy, auditing, etc. and see if they want to plug into any of this work locally. Kim will follow up with Trudy at RENEW about that. Troy talked about Twin Cities Maker and how to connect to the big community of Do-ItYourself work. Like maybe we could do solar a lot more cheaply if community residents who were trained engineers and electricians did direct installs of cheaper bulk panel systems. He'll follow up with them.

 We need much more community understanding about how energy actually works. Many people in the community don't see the importance because they don;t know the big picture of how this connects to coal, natural gas, nuclear etc. and transmission lines, pipelines, etc. - how energy is created, gets to them, and is sold. That might get us to think bigger about the whole system pricing energy in real time, consuming energy when it is produced, not producing it when it is consumed, etc. There's some ideas for how we pull energy solutions together. Maybe we need a cooperative business incubator to have many community energy projects going at once and test what works and what doesn't. Maybe different ones focused on renters, homeowners, commercial, etc. Kind of like the time banking/ Hour Dollars program where people can come together and exchange services. Kim wants to talk with investment experts, Troy to, as a potential investor and project developer. As a property owner who is experimenting with clean energy and energy efficiency, Troy wants to talk to other landlords about using energy efficiency and clean energy as a solution that helps landlords build competitive advantage. The hearing on the Hiawatha Transmission Line is coming up, Troy has done some analysis, and wants to put forward a brief that notes the differing assumptions between Xcel's models and his models and notes that without the information Xcel has been unwilling to release, there is no backing for the results of either Xcel's or his analysis. Regardless of the ruling, we need to get that information to be able to make informed decisions about our energy future We closed the meeting at 7PM.