Our Power

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The Problem: The residents and businesses of the Phillips West, Ventura Village, Midtown Phillips, East Phillips, Corcoran, Powderhorn Park, and Central neighborhoods are spending over $63 million each year on electricity, heating, and gas. While our communities struggle with rising costs and unemployment, we are sending this money out of our community to pay for inefficient, dirty energy. We are paying for energy that harms the health of our neighbors, increases dependence on foreign oil, and hurts communities and ecosystems locally and around the world.

Learn more about some of the problems …

Our Vision: We stand together in creating an energy future that is:

• Affordable: everyone can afford to meet their needs for heat, electricity and transportation.
• Stable: we have reliable access to energy without blackouts or huge energy price shocks.
• Healthy: our energy supports the health and quality of life of our neighbors and others around the world.
• Job Creating: we invest the dollars we spend on heating, electricity, and transit in energy sources that create jobs in our community and build wealth in the local economy.
• Environmentally Sustainable: our energy choices sustain the environment that supports our community, all beings across the planet, and future generations.

Hear a few stories of how we’re coming together in this trailer for a film designed Dan Wilder, a local resident:

Our Solution:

Across South Minneapolis, we are uniting to build an energy future in line with our vision. We work to help ourselves, our neighbors, and the community by:

1. Cutting our energy bills by ending energy waste to keep millions more dollars in the community each year (hundreds per household and thousands for most businesses).
2. Reinvest some of the money we save in projects that help the community save more energy and produce clean local energy. In the process, we support local businesses and local workers and keep the money we pay for energy clean and local.
3. Build our power so our community has more ownership and control over how our energy is produced, managed, and used.

Our Power is a coalition of organizations, local businesses, and community members working together to advance our vision and solutions by:

• Listening to, engaging, and sharing the broad range of concerns, needs, and ideas from the many diverse people and groups that make up our community.
• Ensuring that everyone has access to the information and tools they need to confront their own energy costs and participate in creating a better energy future.
• Clarifying the many existing programs and services already out there so residents and businesses don’t have to navigate a maze of confusing opportunities.
• Working person-to-person to create new action teams and community energy solutions led by people in our community.
• Building community power towards local hiring and local business development, easier financing for improvements, and better support for local energy development from the City, County, State, utilities, and existing organizations and businesses.

Everyone is welcome to participate, share, co-create, and guide this campaign at whatever level you want!

Take Action:

1. Save Energy Yourself (tools and information to help you save energy)
2. Sign Up For Existing Energy Programs (how to access existing energy-saving services).
3. Create Community-Based Solutions (ways you can engage and work with other community members to get more people involved and take collective action).
4. Help Build Our Power (teams you can join to create and advance long-term goals for community energy solutions).