We Want Green Too Featured in Forbes: Why Community-Based Organizations Are the Missing Link in Energy Efficiency

We Want Green Too was featured in a Forbes piece by contributor Brynn Cooksey exploring why community-based organizations, or CBOs, are proving essential to the energy-efficiency industry, not just participants in it.

The article's central argument is about alignment. Investment in energy efficiency keeps growing nationally, driven by goals around lower energy consumption, better indoor air quality, and reduced emissions. But funding and technology alone do not guarantee results. Adoption stalls. Projects underperform. And the households carrying the highest energy burden are often the least likely to benefit from the programs meant to help them.

According to the piece, that gap is rarely about the technology. It is about trust, and CBOs exist at the exact point where programs meet the people they are supposed to serve.

Where organizations like ours come from

The article traces how CBOs typically form: out of necessity, when patterns in a neighborhood become too consistent to overlook. Persistently high utility bills. Repeated comfort complaints. Residents who know a program exists but cannot navigate it or do not trust it. What starts as informal community organizing, workshops, and neighbor-to-neighbor help often grows into a formal organization capable of building partnerships and delivering solutions at scale. That is the story of We Want Green Too's growth on Detroit's East Side.

Leading with listening, not prescribing

Our Executive Director Gloria Lowe is featured throughout the piece speaking to what makes community-driven work different from top-down programs. Her approach starts with communication before solutions. As she told Forbes, the organization's philosophy is direct: we do not know you, you do not know us, so let's get to know one another. The article frames this as one of the defining traits of effective CBOs, that their strategies come from lived experience rather than outside assumptions about how people live.

Lowe also spoke to how she defines success for the community: not something imposed from outside, but something the community defines for itself, centered on the ability to live, strive, and thrive in a healthy, safe environment.

Building a workforce the community already trusts

The piece digs into workforce development as one of the biggest constraints on scaling energy efficiency nationally. Demand for trained energy auditors, HVAC technicians, and building performance specialists keeps growing, but supply has not caught up. Cooksey's reporting points to CBOs as a key part of the solution because they recruit from within the communities they serve, which means the trust is already there before a contractor ever walks through someone's front door.

That trust matters most in the moment a homeowner has to decide whether to let someone into their home, invest in a retrofit, or change a long-standing habit. The article notes that hesitation in these moments is rarely about the technical recommendation. It is about who is delivering it, and whether that person has earned the benefit of the doubt.

Data from the ground up

One of the more striking parts of the piece covers how CBOs contribute to research and program design, not just delivery. Through utility bill analysis, home assessments, and direct resident engagement, organizations like ours collect the kind of granular, neighborhood-level data that broad national datasets miss entirely.

We Want Green Too's own energy burden survey is cited directly in the article. It found that the East Side Detroit service area has energy usage running 10% above the norm for the area, data that has shaped how our programs are designed from the ground up.

The bigger picture

The article closes by making a case that applies well beyond any one organization. The energy-efficiency industry is not short on funding, technology, or programs. What it is often short on is alignment between those investments and the communities they are meant to serve. CBOs bring trust into that equation, ground decisions in real conditions instead of assumptions, and build a workforce that reflects the neighborhoods it works in.

It is a national story about what makes community-driven energy work succeed, and We Want Green Too is proud to be part of that conversation.

Read the Full Forbes Feature → https://www.forbes.com/sites/brynncooksey/2026/06/16/community-based-organizations-working-to-advance-energy-efficiency/