A new group to help US small towns lead the clean energy transition

As the mayor of tiny Enfield, North Carolina, Mondale Robinson has huge clean energy ambitions. Among them: building a solar farm to power the entire town of about 2,000, replacing the town’s decrepit substation to distribute those renewable electrons, and building a thermal energy network to provide heating and cooling and reduce exorbitant electric bills.

But Enfield is one of the poorest towns in the state, where the average household income hovers around the poverty line. As mayor, Robinson earns $500 a month. There are no sustainability officers, no grant writers, no policy teams to help him push this plan forward.

One way Robinson is trying to overcome these hurdles is by working with allies from the closest major metro area. Lawyers from Chapel Hill’s Southern Environmental Law Center, for instance, are negotiating the town utility’s next electricity contract so that it can produce its own solar energy. Researchers at Durham’s Duke University are helping design the geothermal project.

Yet too many doors remain closed to Robinson. The U.S. Conference of Mayors, which has galvanized city leadership on climate solutions, doesn’t extend full membership to leaders of towns as small as Enfield. And most foundations tend to overlook such communities.

So Robinson, a longtime political organizer, decided to do what he’s always done: Join together with his cohorts to fight for change. At a Canary Media summit on clean energy in rural America in September, he announced that he’s launching a new small-town coalition. If towns like his work together, he believes, they can help get new federal policies enacted, attract new donors, and have greater access to experts who can help them confront a host of challenges, from the climate crisis to housing and food insecurity.

“One small town can be ignored,” he said. ​“Thousands of organized small towns become a national constituency.”

Robinson’s National Conference of Small Cities and Rural Mayors is designed for officials of locales with fewer than 30,000 people. The figure is not arbitrary: the U.S. Conference of Mayors serves mayors of cities with populations above that benchmark.

“The national organization that speaks for mayors doesn’t even allow us to be full members,” he said. Yet census data shows that towns like Enfield make up 93% of all incorporated municipalities and house some 60 million people, he said. ​“America is a nation of small towns.”

At the same time, Robinson points out that 90% of philanthropy goes to urban areas. ​“If you consider rural people as a collective, we will be bigger than the largest populated state in this country,” he said, referring to California. ​“And yet, we are not being invested in in a way that makes sense.”

Robinson’s new coalition is still in the early stages. ​“Right now, we’re trying to recruit the first 100 founding mayors,” as well as anchor foundations, he said.

Longer term, his goals for the group include training, peer-to-peer networks, regional collaboration, and a shared voice in federal advocacy. He also believes that small towns, with minimal footprints and more ability than big cities to be nimble, are the best places to test and refine new clean energy models, just as Enfield is aiming to do.

Already, the town has helped form a new nonprofit, Enfield Energy Futures, which has won a small seed grant to pursue the thermal energy network. Its utility could become the first to run such a project in the Southeast.

“What we’re doing here in Enfield,” Robinson said, ​“with no resources, or very little resources, is how we change the lives not just of the people in Enfield but everybody who is living in a small town across this country.”