The president of Blacks in Green talks about utilities as essential services and how to ensure households get the support they need.
By Shabaka Verna
Naomi Davis, president of Blacks in Green, says utilities like water and power are a matter of life and death.
After moving to Chicago to be with her college sweetheart and graduating from law school, Naomi Davis wandered in her journey to discover her soul’s desire. She started out managing memberships and advertising for League of Chicago Theatres, then consulting folks around environmental, economic and social development initiatives. Eventually she realized that her calling was to explore ways to recreate the kind of close-knit neighborhood where she grew up.
“I grew up in a place where I belonged, where I was known, where I was loved,” Davis said, of St. Albans, a neighborhood in Queens, New York. ”You could walk to work, walk to shop or to learn, walk to play. Your dollar could circulate within your neighborhood there. The corridors were populated by Black-owned businesses, people owned their own land, their homes. [They] were not so disconnected from their heritage roots that they were not relating to what we now call the conservation lifestyle.”
This understanding led Davis to create Blacks in Green, and eventually launch Take Back Your Power, an initiative to inform Illinois residents about financial assistance and protections available for people struggling to pay utility bills. Blacks in Green is a nonprofit based out of Woodlawn that “serves as a bridge and catalyst among communities and their stakeholders in the design and development of green, self-sustaining, mixed-income” Black communities, according to its website. Davis, who serves as the organization’s president, shares her insight and vision for utility accessibility for all. Her expertise stems from decades of policy work, teaching, community organizing and research around utilities and green space.
City Bureau spoke with Davis about her vision for Take Back Your Power and utility policy. This was especially important given how energy prices increased sharply in 2021, disproportionately affecting Black- and Latinx-majority ZIP codes. Utility customers in Black and Latinx communities were about four times more likely to be disconnected for nonpayment, according to a Tufts University study on electricity disconnections from 2018-2019 in Illinois.
This is the edited transcript from our conversation.
How have you seen unaffordable energy and utility bills impact communities of color in Chicago?
There is no correlation between energy design, policy implementation and the realities of African Americans, who are well documented to be at one-tenth of the wealth of white crosstown peers. When we say that we are creating affordable housing, we have methods and measures for determining what's affordable in America. Most recently, studies, coalitions, governments and subject matter experts have aligned on 6 percent of household income as a standard for affordability for housing, but there is no mandatory realization of that standard in the practice and the outcomes of utilities in Illinois. If we say something is affordable, are we understanding what that means? If we say something is affordable as a utility, are we recognizing—number one, that we are talking about an essential life service? Number two, we're talking about a government-sanctioned monopoly. Number three, we're talking about a duty to serve, which is a correlate of the franchise. You don't get the franchise without fulfilling a duty to serve and the duty to serve means that all ratepayers are positioned to enjoy the service. And when I say enjoy, I don't mean like, whoo hoo yippee ki yay, I mean utilities are an essential service, and you don't get to deny it to anybody. Now, that is not the current reality because shut-offs are an everyday occurrence.
Is the foundation of the Take Back Your Power initiative to connect people to resources that alleviate debt and halt disconnections?
Absolutely. In one sense, it means that there are programs that exist that are not properly [supported]. That they exist at all is the result of a fight. Or, if they exist, do people know about them? And what have utilities done to make sure that their ratepayers are fully understanding those resources, and are they aggressively uptaking the programs that are available to them? These revolve around the core question, is utility practice structured to enable use of this utility service?
How can community members support the goals of Take Back Your Power?
We are here to be a part of the solution, and we're not stopping until the matter is solved. But it's complicated. And we don't know anyone who's working as many angles as we are. We welcome any of those who are working any of those angles to be in a family dialogue about how we marshal our resources. We are talking to funders every day about increasing the cash flow, because capacity ain’t nothing but a bunch of zeros. We can do anything that anybody else can do. We can transform any situation because we have the commitment, we have the heart, we have the genius, we have the intelligence to do what can be done to transform a situation. We didn't get into the mess overnight, we're not going to get out of it overnight. That's the power of persistence.
Who do you reach with the Take Back Your Power initiative? And who do you wish you could reach?
There are so many different ways that Blacks In Green is involved in energy policy practice and community engagement. We use social media for getting the word out about programs that are available. We have a monthly Black Chicago Water Council meeting and when I say water, I mean to recognize that there is an inextricable correlation between water, energy and other life-essential services. Our model has been evolving and shifting. We are no longer hosting our weekly, one-stop utility shut-on shops, which have been a combination of water distribution on a weekly basis and account service support for neighbors. We had a hotline, where folks could call in and say, “Look, you know, we're just not getting the information and the response or the understanding that we need to keep our services.” [Sometimes their utilities] are on but maybe they're getting ready to be shut off or they've been off for a while and they don't know what to do. We have a very small team and are not especially funded to do what we call ratepayer support services. We're experimenting with: How do we engage in ways that can make a difference at the household level, but also at the policy level? We're expecting to add staff, increase programming and publish information on the regular that systematizes how we are engaging with our neighborhoods. We're looking at how we transform communications, the credit and collection practices, the way that rate-making happens. Helping people at the household level get their services back on or get them the information—that's the frontline urgency, because even though programs are in place, you might not get the right customer service representative. You might get the one who doesn't really understand that the program is available or how it works or how you're eligible. We know this from experience, from talking to people who have had the runaround, and from calling in on their behalf, or with them as ombudsman. [For example], “Miss Smith, why don't you call in, we'll be on the line with you, we'll see what they say.” We understand what the customer service representatives are supposed to know and what they're supposed to say. We have experienced personally, as an institution, as Blacks, that there is a variance in what customer service representatives say they know and what they convey. And that's not acceptable.
Do you collect demographic information about who you reach?
We don’t have the staff or the budget to do that right now. We've been working with Maria Zamudio at WBEZ on a piece on the water shut-offs issue. We've been working with Elevate, formerly Elevate Energy; Anne Evens, CEO; Delmar Gillus, COO, a brother; on how we gather data on water usage, household bills and citywide policy. These are allies who have been closely connected and deeply committed to the facts, the data, the big data. Chicago has a very dysfunctional water policy. I know you think you're talking about energy, but there is no functional distinction. What is water is water and heat is heat, but basically the same things that plague the industry and implementation of one are the same things that plague the policy and implementation of the other. So [we’re] looking at broadband [internet], gas, electricity and water, all four pieces. We’re connecting back to the commons, looking at the investor-owned utilities and their duty to serve, and comparing American and global standards for the rights of ratepayers and users. In other parts of the world, water is considered a human right. Not in America and not in Chicago. Chicago has the most dysfunctional, racist water practice and policy of almost anywhere that we know of. Other than air, water is the next essential service. It's not even a service, you can't live without air. You can't live without water. Who gets to sell it? Regulate it? Price it? That's the power of life and death. Be clear. That's what it is.
This story is available to republish under a Creative Commons license. Read City Bureau’s guidelines here.
Support City Bureau’s community-centered reporting by becoming a City Bureau sustaining donor today.
To get twice-monthly emails including Chicago news and events, sign up for City Bureau’s Chicago newsletter.