Invest in Our Work
Help frontline communities lead the transition off fossil fuels toward safe, healthy housing and economic prosperity.
Empowering Communities, Powering Change
Collectrify was founded on the premise that frontline and fenceline communities must lead the transition away from fossil fuels. We operate a trust-based fund that provides philanthropic and technical resources to grassroots and base-building organizations and leaders working to eliminate fossil fuels from homes and community-serving facilities.
Our partners have already earned their neighbors’ trust—and they are showing people what moving off fossil fuels at home means for their health and utility bills. Too often, they do this work without adequate funding and against policy frameworks that were never designed with them in mind.
We aim to raise $100M by 2028 to eliminate fossil fuels from homes and scale equitable building electrification.
“Being a pooled participatory grantmaking fund is not what makes Collectrify unique. It is about the community. It is a way for members of philanthropy to be better funders and to better serve organizations working in the field.”
— Collectrify Governance Assembly Member
Why Investing in Equitable Building Electrification Matters
✸ Homes are on the frontlines of the climate crisis
Buildings contribute more than 30% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions each year.¹ Today, 61% of U.S. households use methane gas for cooking, heating, and drying clothes. Methane is an extremely potent greenhouse gas—80 times more powerful than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere over a 20-year span.²
✸ Lower bills, healthier homes
Fossil-fuel furnaces, water heaters, and stoves keep families tethered to volatile utility costs. Average residential gas prices rose a staggering 46% between 2019 and 2024, outpacing a 33% rise in electricity prices.³ Burning fossil fuels at home also harms indoor air quality and health, particularly in historically underserved neighborhoods, where residents often already live in substandard housing. Switching to efficient electric systems can lower bills and improve the air families breathe at home.
✸ Leaders who know what works
Frontline leaders know which solutions will work in their communities because they live there, and they will still be there long after any single program or policy ends. They bring insight from lived experience that funders and large organizations often spend years trying to approximate.
✸ Progress that outlasts political shifts
Our partners are advancing concrete solutions at the state, local, and grassroots levels, building lasting public support for healthy, affordable housing that can withstand changes in federal or local politics.
¹ Commercial and Residential Sector Emissions, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
² Household Gas Prices Continue to Grow Faster than Electricity, Stressing Budgets in the Winter Months, Elena Krieger, Ph.D., Just Solutions, May 7, 2026
³ IBID
Collectrify in Action
Together with our partners, we are putting our funding priorities into motion and advancing a new, community-centered economic order.
→ Narrative Strategy Lab
Collectrify’s partners are navigating pushback, competing narratives, and shifting political conditions that shape how the public understands equitable clean energy and housing work. Our Narrative Strategy Lab helps them communicate the benefits of clean energy in ways that resonate with everyone—and build power within the equitable building electrification movement in the process. One example is the Michigan Environmental Justice Coalition’s Mama We Lit fellowship, which uses storytelling workshops and campaigns to center the people most directly impacted by energy burden and climate vulnerability.
→ Community-owned energy
Our Community Ownership action group is building a playbook of field-tested models for community ownership of distributed energy resources (e.g., virtual power plants), mapping barriers to scaling them, and equipping frontline leaders to attract resources and build these models themselves in response to the energy affordability crisis.
→ Healthy homes, healthy lives
Our Healthy Homes Healthy Lives action group is organizing tenants and residents to speak publicly about how pollution from fossil fuel-based appliances affects their health and housing conditions, and making the case for healthy housing as a basic right.
→ Clean energy workforce development
Collectrify has invested in four women-led organizations in Michigan, Illinois, and Virginia that have spent decades building clean energy workforces embedded within their communities.
→ Collaborative learning
Through Collectrify’s national Learning Community Collaboratory (LCC), we host learning events to bring together frontline, environmental justice, and equity partners to build connections, knowledge, skills, relationships, and create new models for transformational change in equitable building. The LCC is a center of education for virtual power plants.
What Your Investment Can Make Possible
✸ $1K-25K
Shift the affordability narrative
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A targeted, short-term energy and housing affordability campaign led by one partner organization
✸ $100K
Grow community leadership
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Staff and operations for organizations like Michigan Environmental Justice Coalition to train residents to tell their stories and lead on policy design and implementation
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Narrative strategy support for existing and new partners
✸ $500K
Build the movement
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Grants to four to five community organizations whose deep local connections make it possible to advance equitable building electrification and affordable energy and housing
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Sustained investment in community-led organizations to drive policy action and building electrification implementation
✸ $1M
Scale across states
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State campaigns that educate on the benefits of virtual power plants and community-owned energy to create resilient, energy efficient affordable homes
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A multistate narrative campaign building lasting public support for moving homes off gas
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Invest in the inclusive economic development vision of women- and community-led clean energy workforce programs scaled to more than five states
We currently fund partners in California, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, and Virginia. As we grow, we aim to increase our giving in the South, on Tribal lands, and in rural areas, and to expand our city-based work in California, the Midwest, and the Northeast.
Now Is the Time for Collective Action
Gifts of any size help resource this work. Join us in powering a more just climate and housing future for all.
To talk about how your support can have the greatest impact, contact us at hello@collectrify.org.
