Update on CEF for everyone

[Timothy DHT]

Hi folks,

So I sent most of this out to the local CEF team already, but I
thought we should update folks more broadly to figure out where we
are:

We are doing the insulation and weatherization on the first pilot
project now (this week). It's only 7 homes, but we got a 5% discount,
and its working! We have more opportunities for better deals and more
scale coming up!

At the Bioneers Conference in San Rafael, which I attended and was on
a panel at for the Brower Youth Awards, I got connected with a couple
of sustainable investors circles that might be useful, and also had
some interesting discussions regarding direct obstacles to the types
of financing we are looking for. I have a lot of contacts with people
who have thoughts on financing that I will be following up with this
weekend. I also met about 4 people who are trying to set up CEF-like
initiatives in different places around the country (MA, Bay Area, TX,
and I'm forgetting one) who want to correspond. We're ahead of the
game, but this is cool and has collaboration potential.

We have the opportunity to apply for a $30,000 near-term grant with a
lot of prestige and connections in Europe. We're acting fast. 3 of our
team is going to Sacramento for a conference just before that. We're
also thinking of launching full-time positions with $90,000 from
Echoing Green if we get it.

Gov. Pawlenty just approved $10 million in Minnesota energy loans that
may be applicable to our "customers". These are cool opportunities.

We are designing our phase 2 organizing strategy and business plan. We
are trying to tap the skills of the Obama campaign, and integrate
everything beautifully.

Then the big one:

This morning I met with some pretty cool folks, and had some pretty
cool discussions, which could lead to some pretty cool results.

Specifically, I met with:
State Senator Ellen Anderson, reps from Xcel - Grania, who I really
like, and the St. Paul labor community, Carl Nelson, Joel Rogers - our
Milwaukee counterpart, and two of his friends who run a consulting
firm in MA to make this stuff work. Plus Senator Anderson's staff.

We talked about:
Joel and his friends are working with a group of foundations on a
"Living Cities" project that will provide about $300 k matched by city
funds to provide about $500 k in technical systems to two cities on a
short-list of 8 (St. Paul and Minneapolis are two candidates) to
design a suite of policy, administration, organization, financing, and
planning tools to make on-bill payment financing and city-wide
transitions to energy efficiency more effective. Ie, all the talk of
building green jobs in the efficiency sector, integrating utility
billing, financing based on savings, and doing it everywhere that we
have always talked about. They were very excited about the cooperative
potential to build local economic opportunities, and our focus on
community organizing and behavior change, which they see as a crucial
piece of this whole. Ie, creating the infrastructure so that hundreds
of millions (billions?) of $ in investment could flow easily and
efficiently to communities taking charge of their energy future.
Basically, it's CEF focused on 1 city without all the crazy
organizing/ long-term power building - though they recognized the
added power of that concept.

What this could mean:
Because we were at the table, we may be able to act as one of the key
players in a major alliance pursuing this project, and are already
recognized as innovators and experts on part of the process. This
could mean that major infrastructure that we need to take CEF huge
being built collaboratively, and us being able to demonstrate the
power of the model to encourage participation in the work we do. What
it would also mean is that if we want a cooperative model, empowerment-
based community organizing, and transforming social norms to be in
this, we have to be able to deliver on our model working to get people
involved. Which brings us back to last night's discussion about
committing to building a really successful way of organizing which is
more efficient and works for us.

Thanks to Kai for being the point of contact to Ellen Anderson for
this amazing hook-up. Because we were at the table from the start,
we'll build a role in this process.

Start piloting CEF nationally through SoS 2009?

So that's the update. Keep it up!

Timothy DHT
PS. If you want to see my Brower video of me being famous, which also
has you guys in some of the shots - this is the video that those film
guys put up, view it here: http://broweryouthawards.org/userdata_display.php?modin=50&uid=3684