RMI’s US Cities & Communities team partners with local governments and community organizations to develop and scale impactful, equitable decarbonization projects and programs. Leveraging years of experience working with communities, our team enables innovative local project deployment by building capacity, supporting stakeholder engagement, and providing key technical insights. RMI then seeks to scale proven approaches by developing resources to help communities overcome key barriers and engaging external partners to create turn-key solutions for local communities.

RMI enables local government and community action by:

1. Supporting ambitious, high-impact projects through direct technical assistance and thought leadership. Examples include:
   • Partnering with the City of Chicago on its innovative 100% renewable energy transaction
   • Helping San Antonio leverage direct pay and streamline solar deployment on 42 city rooftops and parking lots
   • Collaborating with the City of Cincinnati to secure 100 MW of solar generation for its community
   • Articulating the opportunities for holistic community solar projects to address multiple community needs at once.
2. Scaling impactful solutions by engaging groups of communities through workshop series that build local capacity and enable peer engagement. RMI has leveraged this “cohort” model over 25 times to help communities:
   • Launch lower-income Solarize programs
   • Quantify future energy needs to help cities prepare and prioritize their efforts
   • Establish clean, resilient Texas communities after superstorm Uri.
3. Providing simplified, streamlined approaches to enable broader uptake of solutions. Recognizing local communities have many competing priorities, RMI seeks to provide accessible means for communities to achieve their objectives. In some cases, this can take the form of resources such as the AFFORD tool, which provides a pathway to easily identify and prioritize federal funding opportunities, or our Green Upgrade Calculator, which provides a simple, tailored, and technically rigorous analysis of residential decarbonization opportunities. In other cases, our team engages with external partners such as energy developers, policymakers, financial institutions, and other partners to deploy turn-key solutions to streamline equitable, local clean technology deployment.