How Energize Bend creates meaning, community, and joy in local climate work
A guest story from Energize Bend Coalition Coordinator Brennan Breen. The Energize Bend Coalition is one of Breach Collective’s close allies. Together, we are working to transition away from fossil fuels towards clean energy through community education and common sense policies.
Most days, my job involves a lot of conversations trying to connect the dots between electrification and what it actually means for people’s lives. It’s one of the most important climate solutions we have, but it’s not something that really pulls on the heartstrings. We spend a lot of time talking about HVAC systems, heat pumps, building codes, fifth-generation thermal energy networks. None of this immediately helps people understand why this work matters to them, personally. And yet, it provides some of the best opportunities for saving money, improving health, and addressing climate change. So a big part of my work has become translating the weeds into something accessible. Framing electrification not as a technical upgrade, but as a community investment. Making sure the policies we fight for genuinely improve people’s lives.
My background is industry. I trained as a chemical engineer and spent several years working in renewable natural gas. Before that, I did industrial hygiene and environmental compliance at a corporation that makes missiles. Over time, I felt an increasing disconnect between what I personally value – alleviating human suffering, ending poverty, addressing climate change – and what I was doing day to day. This work is part of a personal path toward finding more congruence between my values and my work.
My first real dip into activism was with Fossil Fuel Divestment at the University of Arizona. When I later moved to Bend, it became clear that the most meaningful lever we have locally is decarbonizing our buildings. That realization and my desire to engage in climate work at a community level is what eventually led me here.
Energize Bend was founded in 2022 by a group of community members who noticed something unsettling: Bend passed a Climate Action Plan in 2019, but three years later hadn’t made much progress. There was (and still is!) a huge opportunity around building electrification we weren’t (and aren’t) taking advantage of.
Early on, the work was scrappy. We started by supporting solar and weatherization campaigns without much infrastructure. No mission statement. No website. No clear decision-making framework. When I stepped into the organization about a year ago, much of my focus went to building that structure: clarifying what it means to be a part of the coalition, outlining different pathways for engagement, figuring out how different voices can be most effective in the court of public opinion, and how to communicate broadly about decarbonizing locally.
What I’m most proud of is something that sounds simple but feels rare in nonprofit and policy spaces: we stopped for a moment. People in this field are incredibly prone to running forward with a million good ideas. But real movement-building requires longer-term investments that aren’t immediately tied to a policy win or an outreach metric. It requires slowing down and focusing on relationships.
As a young adult, it was jarring to move from a college environment, where activism and community are baked into daily life, to professional spaces where “volunteering” often means writing an email or showing up to City Hall. Those things matter, but they don’t build connection. They don’t create community. And for a lot of people, especially youth, it can be hard to show up to places and feel like you belong. Young people don’t have a very easy pathway to participate in the public process.
So we’ve tried to reorient our work toward joy and relationship-building. Sometimes that means sidelining the call to action. Sometimes it means simply offering space– to eat together, to talk honestly about climate anxiety, to exist in community. If people have the energy to do more, great! If not, that’s OK too. I’m really proud of how a big part of our work at Energize Bend has been to meet people where they are.
One of the core challenges with electrification – and climate policy more broadly – is that we’re terrible at bringing people along. Policy folks put their heads down and sprint. When we finally look up, we realize we left everyone two miles behind, wondering why we’re suddenly talking about fifth generation thermal energy systems. We tried canvassing for the first time recently, and it made clear how much more basic, relationship communication we need. At the end of the day, electrification spreads through local networks, through family, friends, neighbors talking to each other. The challenge isn’t whether it matters, it’s whether we can tell a compelling enough story that people can see how it connects to their own lives.
I spent four years training to solve technical problems. What I’ve learned is that climate justice is mostly a communications and systems problem. Which is a bummer, because I really like sizing pumps and doing power studies. I never pictured myself as a communications professional. I’m constantly surprised by how much of my work now involves one-on-one conversations, Canva graphics, and learning what a “get ready with me” video is. (I still don’t fully understand them, but apparently they perform well on the algorithm.)
I can’t talk about the good climate work we’ve been doing in Bend without talking about the youth organizers, many of whom have been organizing longer than I have. It’s both heartbreaking and inspiring. One organizer watched the January 6th riots and decided then and there to dedicate her life to justice and organizing. Seeing that level of clarity and urgency from literal children who are still going to school is incredibly powerful. They’re also some of the most compelling messengers we have, especially when it comes to accountability: I’ve never been able to participate in public process, and I’m still going to suffer the most from your decisions.
Also, they know how to use Instagram, which helps a lot.
On a personal level, this work is hard in ways I didn’t fully anticipate. I turned something I’m passionate about into my livelihood and now I need new strategies to mentally clock out. Not to mention being a contractor without paid time off or health insurance. There’s a real disconnect between how much our society claims to value community-centered work and how little it’s compensated. I’ve learned that personal resilience is essential to any movement-building work. Sometimes that means closing a book because I saw the work “electrify” and just can’t do it right now.
I’ve also learned that local government is actually shockingly inaccessible. Elected officials are often part-time, underpaid, working other jobs and/or independently wealthy. Advisory meetings happen at 1 p.m. on a Wednesday. Participation itself requires privilege. In Bend, these barriers intersect with our severe housing and affordability crises. It’s a city that has forced many of my friends to choose between having kids and moving somewhere more affordable. Protecting what makes Bend special requires us to act like environmental stewardship and community well-being are inseparable because they are. There’s no skiing, tourism, agriculture, forestry, ranching, or starting a family on a dead planet.
Right now, climate work is hard – and scary. What helps is joy-forward, relational organizing. Fighting well-funded systems of harm is rarely fun, but it’s more bearable when you’re not doing it alone. Art helps too, and music. In a world increasingly shaped by dehumanizing systems and AI-generated everything, art feels like one of our last safeguards of humanity.
We’re humans. We’re never going to get it perfectly. What’s important is finding a process that consistently moves the needle in the right direction, and learning how to be happy while doing it.
