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Sierra Club Call for Nominations of a Water Utility - Customer Assistance Program 2021
Sierra Club Chapter Information
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National Water Sentinels has been granted Grassroots Network funds to contract with IB Environmental (ibE) to select and assist a community where the local water utility is interested in developing or expanding a Customer Assistance Program (CAP) to help low-income customers who cannot afford to pay their water bills. This project was successful last year with the Allegheny Group of the Pennsylvania Chapter and the Wilkinsburg-Penn Joint Water Authority.
This is a call to Sierra Club Chapters to nominate a local community and its water utility for this project. With input from the Water Sentinels Affordability subteam, ibE will work directly with the community’s utility and a Sierra Club volunteer or a staff person to provide guidance and resources to the selected utility. Having a frontline community organization as a team member will be an asset to your application. Even though the services in the list below will be offered to one specific community only, as part of the program ibE will include other Sierra Club members (via webinars/telephone calls) in the process so that these members may be able to make similar resource suggestions and guidance to other communities.
ibE will provide the following main services to the selected community:
Teach the utility and community members how to do an affordability assessment for the given service area;
Provide suggestions on the types of CAPs and related resources that are relevant to the demographics and economics of the selected community;
Provide community characteristics related to race and age (percentages only);
Provide a rough estimate on how much money implementing the CAP may cost the utility and ultimately the community;
Suggest potential funding sources for the CAP, based on the state where the utility is located. The utility staff and community volunteers can expect to spend 8 – 15 hours on this project from August to October, 2021. The applicants should reach out to the utility before their first conference call in order to ask the utility to participate in the call. If they agree to do this project, they need to consent to the time required and participate in a Zoom call by the end of August. The project will last until the end of 2021. A Zoom call of interested parties must be completed by the end of August.
