June 2024 Great Story

The Spartan Housing Cooperative believes in stewardship, of homes, of our community, of the planet. That’s why I wanted to work with them. The Spartan Housing Cooperative believes in affordable housing, in affordability in housing, and that’s why I wanted to work with them. The Michigan Healthy Climate Plan sets a target of limiting the energy burden of low-income households to not more than 6% of annual income- energy burden for the SHC’s 18 houses in the past few years varies between 3% and 8% of the HUD’s local 2023 Extremely Low Income limit. In order to understand the energy burden and requisite climate impact, the reasonable thing to do is review historic energy costs and usage, import them into Energy Star Portfolio Manager, and do analysis and benchmarking there. Doing this takes data- you need both gas and electric bills from each building, going back at least a year, but ideally as far back as you can get data for. Several details specific to my host site and our electric provider means that we didn’t have that data easily accessible for every house- people at these houses are going entirely based off of paper bills right now, which is an operational concern that puts us at risk for late fees and even shutoffs, and to boot it means that I can’t get my data without tracking down wastepaper baskets in 18 different properties and hoping that what I need hasn’t been recycled yet. Staff are aware of this issue from an operational perspective, but in the nature of organizations needing capacity-building, they’re so busy doing the rest of their jobs that wading through utility paperwork with multiple stakeholders is infeasible. We’re already working hard to keep the lights on, right?

Enter AmeriCorps VISTA veteran Rowan Price, Michigan Healthy Climate Corps rockstar, capacity building powerhouse. I spend two months reaching out to members at all the houses, talking at committee meetings, digging through financial data, and I still come up short. Members just don’t keep usage data (they sometimes don’t always get it in the first place), financial records only record cost, and there was a rate change right in the middle of my analysis period so I couldn’t even estimate usage that way. I was a capacity building powerhouse in the middle of a capacity building blackout. 

Enter one of my cohort members, serving at BWL, our municipal power utility. I’d reached out to him a couple of times, asking what he could do to get us connected with whoever could work this out with us, get all of our houses on the same account with multiple logins or something to get this data where I needed it to go so I could start really serving my community. But that early in our service, he was still getting settled in, finding his flow, getting a handle on his work. Makes complete sense. Then, my phone makes the email noise: “I’ve got it.” And eighteen spreadsheet attachments. I jumped for joy. I told my host site supervisor and everyone in the room. I called my mom. Then I double checked, and it was just cost data- ope. Another email and a couple of days later, though, and I finally had what I need: Electricity usage data, in kWh per billing period, going back two and a half years. All because I had a good working relationship with one of my cohort members, all because service works by bringing the right people together, and all because MiHCC existed to have the right people in the right place, at the right time, and connected them in a way that let something cool happen.

The gas data worked differently. Our gas comes from a different utility, and we have access to a unified portal where my host site supervisor could just download a .csv file of pretty much all the data I could ever want in about five seconds and email it to me. There is perhaps a lesson to learn from that experience as well.