According to the author, Massachusetts has a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to secure investments vital to the future of environmental justice communities. Above, the Boston skyline from Roxbury. (Matt Stone/Boston Herald)
As we decarbonize and move toward a net zero future, we must transition in an equitable way that includes communities of color.
This means ensuring that federal agencies and state governments award energy and environmental contracts in a way that benefits environmental justice communities and Black and brown businesses while investing in climate change mitigation.
The costs of addressing climate change after decades of environmental damage are staggering. Morgan Stanley estimates that stopping global warming and reducing net carbon emissions by 2050 will cost $50 trillion.
McKinsey & Company states, “Our analysis of the industry-standard scenario for net zero by 2050 suggests that about $275 trillion in cumulative spending on physical assets, or approximately $9.2 trillion per year, would be needed between 2021 and 2050.”
The money spent on these initiatives will dwarf the amounts spent on anything else in human history.
The money budgeted, let alone forecast, could significantly transform areas of the state. Roxbury Community College and perhaps Benjamin Franklin Cummings Institute of Technology could receive millions to become a technical assistance center. Small businesses that are in or adjacent to the energy and environmental space, could receive millions in new contracts, meaning new well-paying jobs, and thousands of homeowners and building owners could receive money to decarbonize housing.
This could be the largest missed opportunity in the state’s history. If missed, it will leave millions who can’t afford to transition on the wrong side of the cleaner and greener divide.
We’ll miss the opportunity unless we change the procurement process. Currently, the money is going to better-organized (white) suburban communities and to larger businesses, due to their greater scale and expertise, resulting in further economic, energy, and environmental disparities.
In fiscal year 2022, the federal government awarded $162.9 billion to small businesses, around 26.5% of total contracts. In FY21 only 1.7% of funding went to Black-owned businesses, 1.8% to Hispanic firms, and 2.8% to Asian-American companies, according to the Brookings Institution.
New data from the Massachusetts Supplier Diversity Office (SDO) indicates that minority-owned businesses won contracts worth $217 million from state agencies in 2022. Minority-owned firms received another $133 million in subcontracting and other ancillary work from white contractors working on state contracts, bringing the minority business total to $350 million for the year, or about 5.4% of state contracts.
This means very little of the billions — if not trillions — spent transitioning to a sustainable future will help Black and brown businesses and communities.
The Biden-Harris administration has made environmental justice a priority and has issued an executive order directing federal agencies to promote equity in their procurement practices, but reform is needed at the state level. Many of the federal grants authorized by the Biden-Harris administration target underserved communities, under the Justice40 Initiative. So there is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to secure investments that are critical to reversing decades of harmful environmental conditions.
We will fail our long-suffering local environmental justice communities if we don’t mobilize state-level resources to win federal grants.
This is not a simple case of hiring more grant writers. A winning grant application that complies with the Justice40 initiative requires well-conceived and planned projects, partnerships with community-based organizations, and strong grant writing focused on a compelling value proposition. We need a team of professionals who can orchestrate the development of a winning grant application. The Healey-Driscoll administration needs to increase its capacity to inform community-based organizations (CBOs) of grant opportunities, and it must vet CBOs to find optimal partners for pursuing more grant opportunities.
Given the short window of opportunity and the high potential return on investment, the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs should mobilize resources to ensure that Massachusetts gets its fair share of the billions of dollars being offered by the federal government for local environmental justice communities. Not doing so would send a loud signal that the new administration is merely giving lip service to the goal of an equitable energy system transition. That is not the intent, but it will be the result if we let billions of dollars go to environmental justice communities in other states because we failed to compete.
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts must establish a Project Management Office (PMO) focused on securing for Massachusetts its fair share of the billions in federal grants created by the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill. The PMO would draw resources from state agencies and be responsible for proposal strategy, community outreach, partnership development, budgeting, and grant writing, with tangible diversity, equity, and inclusion goals.
Ed Gaskin is Executive Director of Greater Grove Hall Main Streets and founder of Sunday Celebrations.
