Potential to Empower
The room erupts into whispers as a slide about changing the temperature of your home to decrease your energy usage pops onto the screen. Shock, intrigue, and engagement color the voices of the attendees of the day’s Empower workshop.
Francine Baggi, the Empower Program Director, laughs at the reactions of the attendees. This slide often prompts significant reactions from attendees. It reminds her of when she first learned this information as well.
“When it comes to energy, I felt like I knew everything,” Francine reminisced. “I thought I was doing so much already. But ever since I started working at green|spaces, I realized that there are so many other ways that I could save energy.”
Francine teaching an Empower workshop at Siskin Hospital.
The Empower program travels to different locations around Chattanooga and the surrounding counties to teach regular people sustainable ways to lower their energy bills. Workshop attendees watch a presentation and receive a kit to help them implement the changes they learned about at home. Programs are offered in English, as well as Spanish and Portuguese to benefit the LatinX community in the city.
Empower promotes better quality of life by teaching workshops on how to lower monthly energy bills. The program functions from the belief that if a family can reduce costs from one bill, they are empowered to live comfortably in a home with more money to be used towards food, medication, and family needs.
The Southeast has among the highest electricity bills in the country, and the lowest energy efficiency savings (CleanEnergy.org). Despite having low costs for electricity per kilowatt, Tennessee has the second highest residential electricity consumption in the nation (Energy.gov). This is in part because many homes in the region were built in the 1940's-1960's and did not receive the insulation that modern homes now receive to promote energy efficiency.
Empower workshop attendees picking up their kits after the workshop finishes.
“Sometimes it's not about attendance, it's just about the people that you impact in a workshop. And you give them these better tools to improve their home. And it's just rewarding,” Francine shared.
Francine has enjoyed getting to go into communities to strengthen the ties between neighbors during her time as Program Director.
“People don't just go to their neighbor anymore. I grew up in a community where anytime I needed sugar or an egg, I could go to my neighbor or the next neighbor and it was not a problem. But you don't see that a lot anymore. Empower has this bonding effect on neighborhoods and communities who want to invest in ways where they can become closer,” said Francine.
As the program continues to expand, Baggi hopes to create a type of reward system. If past workshop attendees could prove that their energy bill has decreased by 20% since the workshop they attended, they would receive a reward of some sort. The goal of a reward program would be to encourage the growth of Empower through word of mouth.
“If they talk to their neighbor about this workshop that they went to and they keep getting rewards, even though they went to it months ago, it could encourage more people to sign up for workshops. I want to see if we can get to a point where it's really impacting these neighborhoods and communities,” Francine shared.
Empower has an upcoming workshop in conjunction with La Paz and EPB to combine EPB’s Home Uplift program with the knowledge Empower has to share. Francine is hopeful that the upcoming workshop will have a significant effect on the people who attend.
For information about upcoming Empower workshops, or to request an Empower workshop in your neighborhood, please reach out to Francine at francine@greenspaceschattanooga.com or go to https://www.greenspaceschattanooga.org/empower-chattanooga.
Written by Anna Truss