The Power of Targeted Universalism
While our team brings expertise across many different corners of the energy sector, the heart of Encolor’s work has always been rooted in advancing energy equity. Specifically, we believe true transformation happens through community. Achieving energy goals for everyone requires tailoring pathways that support each community to overcome their specific barriers. Learning what will work to overcome those barriers is best co-created with them so that no one community is left behind. That core philosophy is at the center of a paper written by Rachel Dortin, Principal at Encolor and Director of Community Organizing & Ownership at The Shared Space Project, for the ACEEE Summer Study on Energy Efficiency in Buildings: “Designing for All: How Targeted Universalism Can Expand Reach and Impact in Energy Programs.” Rachel examines how traditional policy approaches often create unintended friction. Broad “one-size-fits-all” models tend to favor well-resourced groups, while strictly targeted programs leave families just above the qualifying threshold feeling excluded. This dynamic of feeling excluded stems from zero-sum thinking—the false belief that supporting one group inherently means taking something away from another.
Rachel’s paper reflects a deeper conversation on our team around how equity is treated across the energy sector. Too often, equity is approached as a checkbox, an afterthought, or a tool to soften a community’s negative perception of a utility. In these scenarios, equity is reduced to a narrow effort to close “participation gaps” among “hard-to-reach” or “low-to-moderate-income populations”—engaging communities transactionally simply to influence customer behavior and boost enrollment numbers. Rachel reminds us that there are real people behind those dashboards. People with unique stories requiring differentiated support.
For our Qualitative Researcher, Dillon Hall, the single most arresting takeaway in Rachel’s paper was just how radically this industry could transform if we simply changed our definition of success. The best part? Across the industry, groups are already sowing the seeds.
When “success” in equity is reduced to a participation quota, well-intended programs don’t always deliver impact—“kilowatt-hours saved, therms reduced, or dollars saved” can tell us what happened, but not for whom—or why. If we can forget the jargon for a second and look at what’s actually happening on the ground, we can begin to see what the people behind the programs might actually need to participate. For decades, the energy sector—bound by government regulatory mandates—has measured success by metrics that look great in a compliance filing but mean nothing to a family sweating through July or shivering through January because they’re terrified of opening the electric bill. Rachel poses a question that gets to the heart of the matter: Are human beings living in “comfortable, safe, secure energy efficient housing with utility bills that they find affordable”?
It’s a simple question that exposes a fundamental flaw in traditional program design. When you offer the same rebate to a struggling neighborhood as an affluent suburb, you aren’t creating a level playing field. Utilities are obligated to serve every ratepayer in their territory, but pretending everyone starts from the same line doesn’t close gaps; it reproduces (and sometimes widens) them. If our programs were designed to ensure the answer was always yes, what might we do differently?
Rachel’s paper offers examples of groups in the energy sector who are modeling elements of Targeted Universalism, asking that very question:
Washington’s Clean Energy Transformation Act (CETA): Sets one shared clean energy goal for the state, while letting each utility customize pathways for its local community.
Ameren Illinois’ Market Development Initiative (MDI): Drives local economic growth by offering CBO grant-writing support, workforce scholarships, and capital for diverse small businesses.
Oregon Multifamily Energy Program (OR-MEP): Replaced first-come, first-served rebates with a scoring system that prioritizes buildings with the highest energy burden.
NV Energy’s Integrated Resource Planning (IRP) Stakeholder Working Groups: Brought local residents, small businesses, and nonprofits into planning meetings to co-design success metrics and investments.
California Energy Commission’s Energy Equity Indicators: Tracks real-time clean energy adoption in lower-income areas so program managers can fix issues immediately.
New York Clean Transportation Prizes (CTP) Initiative: Funded local clean transit projects while using real-time community feedback to make quick, on-the-ground fixes.
We’ve been thinking that Targeted Universalism doesn’t just apply to program design, but also to how we do community engagement work. At Encolor, we strive every day to practice what we preach. Following in the footsteps of the industry examples above (which are well worth a deep dive), we recently put these principles into practice. Partnering with a regional utility and a local community-based organization (CBO) in a small Midwestern city, we worked to co-design program improvements alongside the city community. Partnering with a deeply rooted local CBO to host listening sessions, we sat down with community leaders and residents to understand the unique structural barriers in their hometown—and how the utility could adapt its programs to directly address them. By centering on the community’s lived experience, we helped tailor a strategy that directly addresses what residents need to thrive centered on a shared goal.
Thus, if we want pathways that actually work, communities need to be at the drawing board from day one. Because as Rachel’s paper reminds us, the most powerful thing we can do isn’t to design solutions from afar; it’s to pull up a chair and actually listen to the people who live in the communities where the solution is being implemented. When we abandon zero-sum thinking and build together, we realize the truth at the heart of Targeted Universalism, or as Heather McGhee writes in The Sum of Us: “We are greater than, and greater for, the sum of us.”