This article was written by FUSE Executive Fellow TrixieAnn Golberg
Phoenix knows heat. It also knows what it means when your power bill becomes the bill that pushes everything else over the edge. In a city with more than 80,000 energy‑burdened households, energy affordability is not just a technical problem—it is a daily question of safety, stability, and dignity for families across our neighborhoods.
The City of Phoenix Office of Sustainability has already taken important steps, including adopting ambitious 2050 Sustainability Goals and completing its first Residential Energy Access Plan, which includes six goals focused on participation, increased access, and resilience. But having a plan and living it are different things. Moving from a strategy document to tangible, household‑level change requires focus, coordination, and a shared sense of what “success” looks like for low‑ and moderate‑income (LMI) residents. That gap between plan and practice is where my FUSE Innovation Lab—and my fellowship—came in.
From Problem to Purpose
As a FUSE Executive Fellow for 2025–2026, I was embedded in the Office of Sustainability with a clear charge: help Phoenix expand LMI participation in energy affordability and sustainability programs and reduce energy burden over time. My early months focused on a discovery process—listening tours, data review, and cross‑department conversations—to understand how energy burden manifests across the city and where existing systems struggle to reach the people who need help most.
The numbers alone tell a sobering story. Phoenix has more than 584,000 households; about 150,000 fall below 200 percent of the federal poverty level, and tens of thousands of them are experiencing high or severe energy burden. Many spend more than 6 percent of their income on energy – often in older, less efficient housing stock – while also facing rising rents, extreme heat, and other compounding pressures. At the same time, the city and region are awash in programs: federal and state assistance, utility rebates, weatherization initiatives, solar incentives, and more. If this were purely a technical challenge, that “bounty” of programs should have solved the problem by now.
What I heard instead across residents, community‑based organizations, advocates, and city staff was a pattern of adaptive challenges: mistrust, fragmented information, complex eligibility rules, limited outreach capacity, and mental models that still treat energy burden as an individual failure rather than a systemic issue. One colleague summed it up in a way that stayed with me: “We’re not short on programs. We’re short on alignment, access, and proof that these solutions really work for the people we say we’re prioritizing.”
Against this backdrop, my fellowship goals sharpened into three core aims:
- Help the Office of Sustainability move from planning to implementation with clearer pathways, metrics, and partnerships focused on LMI households.
- Demonstrate inclusive, LMI‑focused pilots using a Plan‑Do‑Study‑Act (PDSA) approach to test and refine interventions.
- Co‑create a practical framework, “Influencing Energy Access at the Household Level: An Inventory for Action,” to guide future decisions.
Bridging the Gap Between Strategy and Action
FUSE promotes Innovation Labs to create structured, community‑centered spaces where local government teams can pause, reflect, and together design tangible next steps. For my fellowship, one of my key performance indicators was to provide a summary analysis and recommendations to guide the department’s energy burden work going forward. I knew those recommendations had to be rooted in the department’s own values, criteria, and lived reality—not just in my analysis or in best‑practice toolkits.
That is why I proposed an Innovation Lab focused on a deceptively simple question:
How can the Office of Sustainability most effectively advance energy access for LMI households through its own actions, partnerships, and the way it influences policy and investment?
The specific challenges I wanted the Lab to address included:
- Translating the Energy Access Plan’s six goals into concrete, near‑term action steps that the team could own.
- Clarifying what “action” looks like for funding, partnerships, performance measures, and policy levers that prioritize energy‑burdened households.
- Surfacing assumptions, questions, and tensions that could become barriers if they remain unspoken.
Having an external facilitator was critical. Dr. Jessica Herbert’s role was to hold the structure, protect the time for reflection and creativity, and support us in quickly turning insights into prototypes for implementation and project management, rather than leaving with a binder of sticky notes and good intentions.
Innovation Labs allow co-creation and ownership toward shared actions. This helps teams communicate and motivate each other on tasks that lead to results.
Dr. Jessica Herbert, FUSE Innovation Lab facilitator
Inside the Lab: Partners, Process, and Priorities
To truly influence energy access at the household level, we needed to start with the people already closest to the work. Our Lab brought together the eight‑person Office of Sustainability team and their critical partners. Guests represented the community of partners:
- City of Phoenix: Office of Innovation, Office of Environmental Quality, Community & Economic Development, Neighborhood Services Department, Human Services, Housing Services, and Public Health
- State of Arizona: Governor’s Office of Resiliency and Housing Weatherization Program
- Community Partners: Maricopa County Housing, Valley of the Sun United Way, The Nature Conservancy, Solar Neighbors United, Unlimited Potential, and Southwest Energy Efficiency Project
These community-facing partners are charged with turning the Energy Access Plan into reality, engaging with utilities, and navigating internal systems and resident expectations on a daily basis.
We literally and figuratively placed the city’s six Energy Access Plan goals at the center of the tables by assigning each working group to one of them:
- Expand the City of Phoenix Weatherization Assistance Program.
- Strengthen community‑driven planning and programs.
- Expand multilingual and community‑based energy education.
- Improve solar access and consumer protection.
- Scale up workforce development.
- Support sustainability advocacy structures.
From there, we used four design pillars:
- Appreciating existing assets for a strength‑based approach.
- Outcome‑focused measurement for collaboration.
- Critical discovery questions for action.
- Future assets are needed for success.
Each group mapped, for its assigned goal:
- Current assets: what is already in place that we can build on.
- Key metrics: what we must measure to know whether we are making progress.
- Critical questions: what we still do not know and must learn before moving.
- Future resources: relationships, data, funding, or tools that must be cultivated.
Conversations quickly became animated and candid. Staff reflected on the complexity of juggling technical, political, and relational work; on the cost of under‑investing in data; and on the reality that energy access is “a team sport with far‑reaching implications,” touching everything from housing stability to economic mobility.
Two cross‑cutting themes emerged strongly during report‑outs:
- Data: access, reliability, ownership, and disaggregation, especially being able to see where energy burden overlaps with race, income, geography, and housing type.
- Relationships: how to leverage, cultivate, and support internal and external conveners, from community‑based organizations and utilities to neighborhood leaders and city departments.
In the last third of the four‑hour Lab, each group committed to specific 90‑day actions tied to its goal, moving us decisively from “discussion” into “design for implementation.”
Two things can really supercharge innovation within local government: data and collaboration. The Lab created the space for unique perspectives to come together to consider challenges, explore opportunities, and create actionable steps forward.
Michael Hammet, City of Phoenix Chief Innovation Officer
Insight to Execution: Early Lessons from the Lab
Many of the questions we posed going into the Innovation Lab were answered, at least in first‑draft form; others sharpened and became more productive. Among the key takeaways:
- Even highly technical problems rely on relational solutions. We can have the best rebate in the world, but if trusted messengers are not engaged or do not understand it, it will not reach the households we care about most.
- Costs and benefits are routinely misestimated. Some interventions are oversold; others are undervalued because their benefits accrue across systems rather than back to the program that funded them.
- The benefits of reducing energy burden for LMI households, such as greater housing stability, improved health, and better utility load management, often flow to parts of the system that are not directly investing in these solutions.
Because the Lab was structured around actionable design elements, we left with a documented on‑ramp to begin work almost immediately:
- Office of Sustainability and Neighborhood Services staff have begun updating and revitalizing resident, property‑owner, and contractor communications, anchored in the Energy Access Plan goals and informed by Lab insights.
- Residential solar advocates and city staff are aligning efforts around energy education, efficiency, and consumer protection to ensure LMI residents are better informed and less vulnerable to predatory practices.
- With greater clarity on priority data points and disaggregation needs, staff and community partners share a clearer understanding of what must be tracked to evaluate progress toward ending concentrated energy burden.
These threads directly inform my FUSE deliverables, including two PDSA pilots: a rental‑community energy assistance pilot with utilities and property owners, and an “Energy Access Allies” convening network that equips frontline community‑based organizations to identify energy burden and support residents with enrollment. The Innovation Lab helped stress‑test those concepts against real‑world constraints and surfaced new partners and considerations that are now embedded in the pilot designs.
Fellowship Reflections: Leadership, Legacy, and Long-Term Impact
My FUSE fellowship is, in many ways, a culmination of four decades of C‑suite leadership and systems work across philanthropy, nonprofits, entrepreneurship, and economic and community development. Phoenix has challenged me to bring that experience to an issue that is both deeply technical and deeply human—one that sits at the intersection of climate, housing, infrastructure, access, and economic opportunity.
The Innovation Lab crystallized several ongoing lessons:
- Co‑design prevents “scope creep” by anchoring decisions in shared values and clearly defined focus populations.
- Implementation planning must start early; otherwise, even the best plans stall at the water’s edge of day‑to‑day capacity.
- Equitable engagement is not a side project; it is the operating system for any serious attempt to move the needle for LMI households.
When my fellowship concludes, I hope to leave the City of Phoenix with:
- A practical, tested framework, “Influencing Energy Access at the Household Level: An Inventory for Action,” that helps staff evaluate interventions, funding opportunities, and partnerships through an LMI and community-first lens.
- Two or more pilots that demonstrate measurable increases in LMI participation in energy affordability and sustainability programs, and that provide lessons for scaling and replication.
- Stronger cross‑department and community relationships, including an emerging network of “Energy Access Allies” that can carry forward outreach, education, and trust‑building long after my fellowship ends.
Ultimately, Phoenix has set a bold vision to be the most sustainable desert city in the world—and that vision will only be realized if energy access is not a privilege, but a shared baseline. My role as a FUSE Executive Fellow is to help ensure that the benefits of that vision reach from the council chambers to the kitchen tables of the households who have the most to gain—and the most at stake.
