Leveraging Community Benefit Frameworks: Empowering Communities to Benefit from Federally Funded Energy Projects: Proceedings of a Workshop (2025)
Chapter: Appendix D: Workshop Slido Results
D
Workshop Slido Results
The goals of the workshop can be grouped into two categories: (1) inform the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) efforts in improving and implementing community benefit plans (CBPs) and (2) discuss the benefits and challenges of different types of community benefits negotiations (i.e., project labor agreements [PLAs], community benefits agreements [CBAs], good neighbor agreements [GNAs], and community workforce agreements [CWAs]), which can be part of CBPs. The different types of negotiations are included in the planning committee’s definition for community benefit frameworks. A key element of addressing these categories was to hear from various people about their experiences with and thoughts about CBPs, including audience members who were not speakers and who were not able to attend in person. Throughout this workshop, Slido was used to interact with the audience through Q&A sessions and polls. Before the workshop began, a survey posed questions to get a sense of what the audience sought to get out of the event. Figure D-1 shows that a large majority of respondents (87 percent) attended the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine workshop to build on existing knowledge about the topics on the agenda. The information collected by Slido was used to determine how well the workshop achieved its goals and some results are displayed below.3
___________________
3 Visit the workshop’s event page to view all the result of all the Slido polls: https://www.nationalacademies.org/event/42465_05-2024_leveraging-community-benefit-frameworks-empowering-communities-to-benefit-from-federally-funded-energy-projects.
NOTE: Results show responses from 69 participants.
SOURCE: Data collected through Slido.
THE DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY’S COMMUNITY BENEFIT PLANS PROCESS
To inform the DOE CBP process, the planning committee was tasked to review the status of community benefits determinations, guidance, and tools developed by DOE and other agencies (National Academies’ CBA study page). To address this, the workshop’s opening panel sought to help DOE to understand how communities are experiencing the CBP process and to aid the audience in gaining a shared understanding. The poll for this session asked the audience to self-report how clear the CBP process was (see Figure D-2). From the responses gathered, 42 percent of respondents did not have strong feelings about the clarity of DOE’s strategy. See Box D-1 for the audience’s suggestions for how DOE can improve its CBP process.
NOTE: Results show responses from 19 participants.
SOURCE: Data collected through Slido.
BOX D-1
Workshop Audience Suggestions for How to Improve the Department of Energy’s Community Benefit Plan Process
Following the end of the first workshop session, the audience was asked how DOE could improve its CBP process. The Slido open text poll received responses from 16 participants:
- Making them accessible to the public to view.
- Automate parts of it and hire technical assistance providers.
- Providing more examples of good plans.
- Make transparent companies who are actively applying for grants and loans for early intervention (rather than waiting for an award/conditional commitment announcement); require companies to commit to negotiating a CBA, including labor organizations (not just PLAs for construction jobs!), environmental groups, tribes, and other relevant local community organizations—the groups can take care of enforcement if the basic framework is provided.
- Reducing barriers by addressing resource gaps and other competing requirements.
- Building community capacity to engage meaningfully (become acquainted with technical aspect, civic engagement because they have not been, etc.)—accountability and continued engagement from beginning, middle, to end enables a community to have a way
- to flag bad projects or when projects are not meeting their commitments. There needs to be a connection between community and DOE.
- Ensure that community-based organizations and other nonprofits are also included in CBA trainings and are knowledgeable in how to guide communities in the CBA/CBP process.
- Require risk (health and other) assessment and transparency.
- More information about CBPs submitted should be shared, including specific plans for engagement, which stakeholders are being engaged, what kinds of benefits are proposed, what opportunities/plans to make CBPs binding or transform into binding community benefit frameworks exist, and what modes for enforcement/oversight are included in the CBP, etc.
- Pay communities to hire good lawyers to negotiate agreements, fund opposition to hubs, develop long-term enforcement plan for agreements and fund enforcement.
- Training.
- Create an enforcement arm to ensure paramount transparency, accountability, equity, and justice are centered in every phase of these projects, from ideation to implementation.
- Stronger language on what is an acceptable versus unacceptable CBA. The language currently used is “effective CBA” versus “ineffective CBA.” Would like to see a clearly defined scenario in which a rejected CBA stops the project from happening. If such a scenario does not exist, then I feel this conversation is about checking boxes of surface level community participation and not actually gathering and incorporating feedback from the community to center their needs.
- Return to a mixed use of portfolio of quantitative, and more importantly, qualitative metrics for improvement. Reduce the moving target nature of it as well.
- The process, as it stands, is applicant/awardee-driven. It needs to center community first.
- Allowing for flexibility in the budget for community benefits as the community needs may change from the proposal stage through completion of the project.
COMMUNITY BENEFIT FRAMEWORKS
Several workshop sessions highlighted the different processes for and results of community benefit framework negotiations and how these negotiations can be supplemental to DOE’s CBP process. While the workshop’s panels included scholars, legal experts, and community and labor representatives, it was of interest to know how much knowledge and experience of the audience with these types of negotiations. The audience was polled at various times throughout the workshop about community benefit frameworks (see Figures D-3 through D-5). Figure D-3 shows that out of 69 respondents, about 51 percent self-reported that they had basic knowledge of community benefit frameworks, while 7 percent of respondents self-reported themselves as experts on the topic. When asked which type of framework the audience had experience with, only responses were collected; a high majority (78 percent) had no experience with any community benefit frameworks named (see Figure D-4).
Outside of the DOE session, the workshop focused on learning about the broad landscape of frameworks for providing community benefits; hearing about successful community benefit engagement models, tools, and resources needed for meaningful negotiation and understanding what is required for proactive and long-term capacity building in communities. In particular, the “Frameworks for Delivering Community Benefits” and “Building Proactive and Long-Term Capacity for Communities” sessions were developed to improve knowledge about existing community benefit frameworks and their challenges. Additionally, the in-person “Build a Community Benefits Plan” activity sought to operationalize the audience’s understanding of community benefit frameworks by providing a space to develop a CBP for an imaginary community. Some key audience-generated thematic words are presented in Figure D-6.
NOTE: Results show responses from 69 participants.
SOURCE: Data collected through Slido.
NOTE: Results show responses from 9 participants.
SOURCE: Data collected through Slido.
NOTE: Results show responses from 7 participants.
SOURCE: Courtesy of FreeWordcloudGenerator.com.
