When the Environmental Protection Agency’s $7 billion Solar for All program was gutted earlier this year, the cuts didn’t just cancel line items in a federal budget. In Georgia and Mississippi, they unraveled workforce pipelines, apprenticeship programs, and years of community organizing built on the promise that clean energy investment would finally reach the people who needed it most.
“It was like a rug snatched from under us,” said Clem Howard Hutchinson, executive director of the Clarence and Mary Lee Howard Foundation in Yazoo City, Mississippi. “We felt like we were so close to bringing about such an incredible impact down home in the Mississippi Delta. It was spiritually devastating, it was emotionally devastating, it was mentally devastating, and it was certainly financially devastating.”
In Georgia, Adrienne Rice, founder and executive director of Sustainable Georgia Futures, was in the middle of celebrating a program launch when her community’s Solar for All money disappeared almost overnight.
A Grant Built on Years of Groundwork
Solar for All grants were designed to funnel federal Inflation Reduction Act dollars into low-income and disadvantaged communities, pairing residential solar and weatherization work with job training. In Georgia, the nonprofit lender Capital Good Fund was awarded $156 million to bring solar and energy retrofits to roughly 800 homes across the state, with a focus on Atlanta, Decatur, and Savannah as well as Augusta and southwest Georgia around Albany.
Sustainable Georgia Futures had spent years laying the groundwork that helped make the award possible. Through a City of Atlanta pilot initiative called Weatherize ATL, Sustainable Georgia Futures collaborated with Greenlink Analytics and Partnership in Action for Healthy Living (PAHL) to collectively reach more than 5,000 households and help connect more than 300 homes with energy audits and retrofits. Greenlink Analytics led the research and survey reporting, while PAHL was responsible for the energy audits and energy-efficiency retrofits.
That track record, and the infrastructure created through this partnership, helped Capital Good Fund demonstrate to federal regulators that genuine community engagement and implementation capacity already existed on the ground.
Capital Good Fund brought Sustainable Georgia Futures on to lead community education, building on the momentum of a pre-apprenticeship program the organization had already developed to train people for weatherization and solar installation work.
Black workers make up roughly 13% of the U.S. population and roughly the same share of the overall workforce, but have historically been underrepresented in the clean energy sector specifically. For Rice, Solar for All was one of the first times her community had real access to the contractors and corporations competing for a piece of the funding — an opening to place Black workers directly into the industry rather than simply training them for jobs that didn’t yet exist locally.
In Mississippi, a similar dynamic was unfolding. The Clarence and Mary Lee Howard Foundation, a small family foundation founded in 2022 to serve the Mississippi Delta, partnered with Groundswell, the nonprofit that won a $156 million Solar for All grant for the region. Hutchinson said the foundation began organizing with churches and community leaders, laying the groundwork to recruit participants for the program — people who might go from earning $10 or $11 an hour at fast food restaurants or tire shops to $25 or $30 an hour as trained solar installers.
“There were just so many unlimited possibilities,” Hutchinson said, describing the potential for homeownership and for families to afford to save for their children’s education. “We were overjoyed.”
The Cancellation, and the Scramble that Followed
Rice sensed the funding was in danger during her organization’s annual staff retreat, which fell the first weekend of November 2024, days after that year’s presidential election, at Savannah’s historic Dorchester Academy — a building once used to train civil rights leaders including Martin Luther King Jr. and Andrew Young. More than 100 people, including local elected officials, gathered as Sustainable Georgia Futures launched a new civic engagement campaign.
The freeze arrived roughly a year later. Rice celebrated the launch at Trees Atlanta alongside Chandra Farley, the City of Atlanta’s Chief Sustainability Officer, as well as the mayors of Savannah and Decatur, only for the funding to be frozen the very next day and formally pulled back within the week.
The fallout was immediate and personal. Sustainable Georgia Futures had just graduated its first cohort from the pre-apprenticeship program, four participants who had earned OSHA certification and were ready to move into paid solar and weatherization jobs with partner contractors. Without the grant funding to support onboarding and training costs, those companies could no longer absorb the new workers. One facilitator managed to place some of the newly certified apprentices with jobs, but in Virginia, far outside where the participants could afford to relocate.
In Mississippi, the Clarence and Mary Lee Howard Foundation had not yet reached the stage of identifying individual participants when the news broke, but the loss reverberated through the relationships they had already built.
“From talking to the pastors and talking to community leaders, they already knew people in their church who could truly benefit from a program like that,” Hutchinson said. “They were already looking forward to their congregation members being a part of the program.”
Organizations Regroup
Both organizations have since redirected their energy and fundraising elsewhere, without ever setting aside the goal of resuming the work one day.
The Clarence and Mary Lee Howard Foundation pivoted toward other community needs: a fundraising walk that raised more than $10,000 for pancreatic cancer research in honor of a family member who died from the disease, book donations to a local elementary school, clothing drives, and emergency relief after a winter ice storm. Hutchinson said she remains in close contact with Groundswell and holds out hope that a similar opportunity will eventually emerge for the Mississippi Delta.
Sustainable Georgia Futures shifted its focus to its “100,000 Georgians” campaign, an effort to build political engagement and leadership capacity in rural communities across the state through a series of community “issue assemblies,” gatherings where residents vote directly on the issues they want the organization to focus on. At a recent assembly in Macon, Rice said, the economy and job losses ranked as the top concern, with residents visibly startled to learn how close the Inflation Reduction Act funding had come to reaching their communities before it was clawed back.
Rice argues that the disconnect between what was actually at stake and what voters understood at the time is part of what made the funding vulnerable to cancellation in the first place.
“The reason why this current administration was able to scrape away this funding the way that they were able to do it… was because the backing of communities were not there,” she said. Her organization’s current strategy is built on the belief that broader public awareness — reaching people before funding decisions are made, not after — will make similar investments more durable the next time they materialize.
The Bigger Picture
Both leaders frame the loss of Solar for All within a wider economic anxiety spreading across the rural South. Rice pointed to slowing job growth nationally and rising costs as signs of a possible period of stagflation, a topic Sustainable Georgia Futures is now planning to address directly in an upcoming installment of its monthly Climate Justice Meeting series, alongside a broader recap of the Solar for All story itself.
For both organizations, the setback has not erased the underlying need the grant was designed to address. If anything, both leaders said, it has sharpened it — leaving workforce and economic development infrastructure half-built in communities that, as Hutchinson put it, “do not get resources.”
“I have hope. I’m an eternal optimist,” Hutchinson said. “I have hope that one day, if it’s not Solar for All, something similar will come about.”
