Jennifer Somers has spent more than twenty-five years working at the intersection of energy, climate, health, and justice. As Co-Executive Director of Collectrify: A Frontline-Led Energy Fund, she works on one of the most urgent challenges of our time: solving housing and energy affordability by transforming the built environment into a catalyst of economic opportunity for frontline communities. 

 

Jennifer has moved between many worlds that shaped her career, and that movement is central to what she brings to this work. She began as an organizer and project manager with community-based organizations across San Diego, Houston, and the San Francisco Bay Area, leading programs focused on community economic development, energy-efficient and healthy housing, and environmental justice. In one of her most visible roles, Jennifer served as a Senior Policy Advisor for the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy during the Obama Administration, where she led the implementation of federal stimulus dollars that facilitated weatherization and energy efficiency upgrades for over one million homes for limited-wealth families in three years. In doing so, she helped to codify the leadership of the Weatherization Assistance Program in the home performance industry. She went on to serve as Program Director at the U.S. Energy Foundation, managing strategic grantmaking to advance clean energy access and thriving, resilient communities across twelve states.  

 

What Jennifer carried back from those policy and philanthropy roles was clarity that the strongest solutions to the clean energy transition will emerge from community-based leadership. At Collectrify, she works alongside leaders and organizations to ensure that underinvested communities and those who have been living on the fenceline of extractive industry are resourced to shape the policies and economic futures that affect them most. 

 

With a Bachelor of Arts from Fairfield University in Economics and Spanish and a Master of Public Affairs from the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, Jennifer’s formal education laid the groundwork for a career in public service—but her commitment to a just transition began even earlier as a Jesuit Volunteer Corps member working on the U.S./Mexico border.  She has served as Co-Chair of the GREEN Working Group for The Funders’ Network, where she spearheaded the development of the Systems Transformation Learning Series for philanthropy, and on the boards of Build It Green and the Interstate Renewable Energy Council. She is a current Salzburg Global Fellow.

 

Jennifer believes that deeper alignment across sectors and bold community-based solutions are the way toward a future free from the harms of fossil fuels—and that the innovation we advance today will shape what’s possible for generations to come.