When the $27 billion in the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund starts rolling out any day now, it will kick off an inclusive green energy transition that promises to reach deep into long-neglected communities. Jahi Wise was instrumental in making that happen.
Wise was an advisor to a newly elected President Joe Biden when ideas began to take shape for a national “green bank” to spur local lending for green energy retrofits, heat pumps, community solar and other green projects. The Inflation Reduction Act, passed two years ago next week, carved out $27 billion for such a “bank,” to be overseen by the Environmental Protection Agency.
Appointed director of the GGRF in Dec. 2022, Wise was tasked with designing the program to leverage up to $7 in private capital for every $1 in government money. Wise had worked for the Coalition for Green Capital, led by former FCC chief Reed Hundt, which had long pushed for a single national green bank that would work with the private sector on green loans.
Community development financial institutions, or CDFIs, worried that their organizations, and the disadvantaged communities they serve, would be cut out of the action. Wise, also a veteran of the community-focused energy retrofitter BlocPower, was ideally suited to bring the camps together, if not always cordially.
“I always found him to be somebody who was really in the room listening to us at the CDFI level and really trying to understand what our motivations were for wanting to be a part of it,” Amir Kirkwood of the Justice Climate Fund told ImpactAlpha.
That listening, and hundreds of public comments, led Wise to set aside the single national entity in favor of a competitive grant program for a more distributed, community-centered model. When the grants were awarded in March, Hundt’s green bank group, which had angled for $10 billion, got just half of that. The process enlisted the full range of organizations needed to move money to communities and businesses that have been underserved by traditional lenders.
In addition to the Coalition for Green Capital, the conduits for the GGRF’s main program, the $14 billion National Clean Investment Fund, will be two coalitions of community-based nonprofits. The biggest chunk, $7 billion, will go to Climate United, a partnership of the financial nonprofit Calvert Impact, affordable housing funder Community Preservation Corp, and Self-Help, the national community development financial institution.
Late last year, Wise passed the reins to David Widawsky, a longtime official at EPA and other agencies, to implement one of the biggest expansions of community-based lending in the nation’s history, in service of one of the biggest-ever upgrades in community infrastructure. One of the most lasting impacts of the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund may be the distributed, inclusive, collaborative network of green lenders it will leave behind.
