At the beginning of 2024, SCoRE launched an External Advisory Council, composed of key partners with deep expertise in sustainability, innovation, and community engagement. This group is supporting SCoRE’s transition and advancing our new mission and scope: engaging faculty, students, and staff in long-term, strategic research and education collaborations with community partners, focusing on sustainability in the Atlanta region, the state of Georgia, and the Southeast. In particular, Advisers will draw on their expertise and experiences to guide SCoRE on community-engaged research and Community Benefit Plans related to emerging clean energy technologies. The group has already made significant contributions: they served as moderators and panelists at the SCoRE - Strategic Energy Institute co-hosted symposium, "Advancing Emerging Clean Energy Technologies for Community Benefit and Decarbonization: Continuing the Conversation" in April. Additionally, the EAC has, through its network, already brought new partners, such as local artists and arts organizations into SCoRE’s orbit and, by extension, that of national leaders, working at the intersection of equity, community engagement, and clean energy technology.
We are so honored the following individuals agreed to join the council; the SCoRE staff is deeply proud to work alongside them:
Jay Bassett, GT Alumnus and Sustainability Advisor
Pamela Fann, Founder and CEO, Integrated Solutions
Garry Harris, President, Center for Sustainable Communities
Dr. Erica Holloman-Hill, Chief Envisioning Officer and Chief Scientific Officer, Ayika Solutions
Dr. Yomi Noibi, ECO-Action
Alicia Scott, Georgia State Director, Energy Foundation
Janelle Wright, Environmental Justice Programs Manager, West Atlanta Watershed Alliance
Once a month over the remainder of 2024, we will profile one EAC member. This month, we are delighted to share an interview with Alicia Scott. The conversation between Alicia and Ruthie was edited and condensed.
Ruthie Yow: Alicia, we are so lucky to have you on the EAC, and I'm excited to have this conversation. To begin, I'd like to ask: what is something that you want people to know about you and your work?
Alicia Scott: They call me the coalition whisperer. That is my superpower: getting groups of diverse people together and executing on big audacious goals.
My graduate work and study were in diplomacy; I'm also a trained mediator in the state of Georgia and it has created a skill set that allows me to work with groups of folks who have divergent ideologies and different cultural backgrounds. I get them to play well in the sandbox. I'm [also] able to articulate what people are able to achieve.
I've taken [those skills] and started Coalitico LLC, which is a combination of "politico" and "coalition." I specialize in advising philanthropy and NGOs on community engagement, grantmaking and funding strategy, as well as political strategy and policy implementation. I bring together the people needed to move the needle, with a very lean framework. People are realizing that if you're not doing it right, communities will slam the door. I wrote and produced a documentary called the Fourth Arm when I was at the Partnership for Southern Equity. It highlights the [stories of] community organizers sharing what it's like to do that work, because most people don't understand [the role of community organizers]. I also created a values-oriented training workshop. With those skills and experiences, I have created my own curriculum on how to engage elected officials. We often take for granted that communities know who the decision makers are - we bark at mayors or legislators when it's the Public Service Commission [PSC]. When we think it's the PSC, it may actually be an issue that needs to be taken up by the legislature. So, you have siloed sectors of society where people don't know "who's on first."
We assume that community members understand and that legislators understand how [to effect change or craft effective policy]; so, you see funders supporting groups that are the loudest or prettiest, but not necessarily the most effective. I can bridge grass tops, grass roots [and other sectors] in a city or state or region. I build up the actors necessary to move a particular agenda forward, and I like to use an incremental approach. People want to do biiiig things that will burn people out, so I start by first getting [everyone] aligned - even if it takes six months - to determine what we need. The groups that I work with, I act as a thought partner with them, and I build trust across the groups because my approach is very humanistic. In building solid coalitions, you have to make sure the human parts are taken care of first - so that folks can laugh and share and be reminded that we are human. Through a fog of political polarization, we forget that. We want to dig our heels in on the left and right. But we all share this planet, so if we don't remember that, we will perish. People in red states are being impacted first and worst, but many rural republicans hate the word justice because they worry they will take the lashings their great, great grandaddies deserve.
RY: Thank you for that insight about the word "justice" and its impact on people. It brings to mind a podcast I'm listening to called "Forty Acres and A Lie" which revisits Field Order No. 15, the deeding of land to - and then the yanking back of that land from - newly freedpeople, returning the land to slave-owning white families. This land in the Sea Islands is now worth tens of millions of dollars. It made me ruminate on why - when the reparation of land seems so clear - there is no demand for that accountability. What are some of your reflections when it comes to these questions of racial justice and the way forward?
AS: We need "a prayer for relief" - that means that we need to determine the tangible thing the reparation should be. College tuition? Land? Then we need to answer the question: how do we fund relief? We know we need reparative justice here. We can fund it at the national level if we added one nickel to every stock, bond, mutual fund, options trade happening on the American stock exchanges - even just the NYSE companies. We could add a nickel, and not a one of us would notice. Remember that the first stock exchange was the slave trade; in Savannah, there was a speculative market in human trading. They would say, "we have a lot of fifty negroes coming." So let's take that same framework, since we know that's the framework upon which the rest was built. Pool those nickels and create a fund or endowment that allows the descendants of enslaved Africans to do whatever that relief should [allow]. Maybe it funds healthcare - a single payer system of care for descendants of the enslaved; perhaps it funds a specific type of home loan. We can do this, but we don't have legislators with the vision or the will to put forth those policies.
We are all victims of racism. The hardest part for African Americans is to disabuse ourselves of the idea that we must live in a perpetual state of suffering. At some point, someone has to pivot toward healing. We have to. We must look at what that whole model of killing, stealing, and extracting did to all of us. Until we see that we are all affected by the past, we won't have a shared understanding of how we are all affected. Until we stop the cycles of hurt and harm, we cannot have healing and be able to answer the question: How do we move forward together?
RY: How do we?
AS: I try to zoom out and see where our divergent cultural ideologies are to see the humanity of it all. I seek alignment. Let's baby-step our way there. In order for us to repair the chasm, we have to reach the understanding that we are all victims of that story. We are trying to fix the mess of people who are long gone; it's stressful for white people and stressful for black people. Are those stressors different? Yes. But I believe in the law of attraction - from a woo-woo standpoint but also from the standpoint of quantum physics. I believe the energy that you continue to put out there will create more of itself. I don't know that the energy behind the word justice is how you go about reparative racial reconciliation. Let's have a societal healing summit - coming together to be reminded that we are all human. Both groups have to heal: white people have to be able to talk without guilt and black people to talk without rage. We are a mixed bag of love here in the US - we are a swirl! So, we have to, for the sake of the family unit, the basic unit of power.
RY: How interesting - I haven't considered the family that way.
AS: It is how you hold wealth. Think about monarchies! Marriage was created for the accumulation and preservation of wealth across families. If we stay at each other's throats, that family unit will break down and cause chaos. We need to see ourselves as a global family. Some of us were adopted. Some of us are red headed stepchildren. But we are all family, and we cannot go into the past and right the wrongs. At some point we have to put a door right here through which we walk and create a much better world.