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Perspectives, Part 2: Challenges and Enablers for Successful Community Benefits Agreements

The power should rest with people.
—Oleta Garrett Fitzgerald, Children’s Defense Fund and Southern Rural Black Women’s Initiative

The “Perspectives, Part 2” session of the workshop was centered around representatives of community-based organizations who shared their perspectives on the challenges encountered during community engagement efforts and while negotiating with developers. The panel also highlighted the factors and conditions that enabled them to reach successful outcomes. The panel was moderated by Annie Contractor from Rural Organizing Education Fund, focused on building local power, turning local priorities into proposed policies, and working on getting the policies passed through the political process. The panelists included Meagan Niebler, Fair Shake Environmental Legal Services; Oleta Garrett Fitzgerald, Children’s Defense Fund and Southern Rural Black Women’s Initiative; Rebekah Gorbea, Tennessee 4 All, and Scott Douglas, Greater Birmingham Ministries.

COMMUNITY BENEFITS IN RURAL COMMUNITIES

Contractor started the panel by asking the speakers to share more about their recent experiences with the community benefits agreement (CBA) framework. Gorbea said that her organization is trying to work with Ford on a new electric vehicle plant in Blue Oval City, in Stanton, Tennessee. The rural town is home to about 1,600 people. Additionally, the surrounding towns are majority Black. Tennessee 4 All is concerned that these communities will have to “bear the brunt of the rising housing costs and utility costs that are going to come with Ford’s BlueOval City project.”

Niebler shared that her organization provides pro bono legal representation for environmental nonprofits, grassroots groups, and communities in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. Currently, she is working with five

communities that range between urban, small town, and rural communities on legal representation and community-based programming around CBAs. One of her current projects is working with the communities impacted by the Appalachian Regional Clean Hydrogen Hub to help them with CBAs and to provide recommendations to the Department of Energy (DOE) on community advisory boards.

Douglas is the director of Greater Birmingham Ministries in Birmingham, Alabama, and shared a recent CBA victory for his organization, which is a faith-based, direct service, and systems change organization. He discussed Alabama’s first industrial CBA with New Flyer Corporation’s electric bus plant in Anniston, Alabama (mentioned in Chapter 4), that connected several unions, faith-based organizations, communities from the City of Anniston, and the region where workers have successfully unionized and ratified their first union contract, and a historically Black college or university researching attitudes of workers and the people in the Anniston area.

Fitzgerald shared that her Jackson, Mississippi–based office advocates for issues related to children and women in Department of Agriculture–designated persistently poor counties in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi. Much of their current work focuses on broadband access. Georgia has $1.3 billion in federal grants for broadband expansion, Mississippi has $1.3 billion, and Alabama has $1.4 billion. Fitzgerald’s organization ensures that the grant dollars do not end solely in the hands of Internet service providers and bypass local communities.

Power, Trust, and Community Benefits Frameworks

Contractor asked the panel to weigh in on who should be the stakeholders, how should they be represented, and what powers should they have in the CBA process. Fitzgerald responded, “The power should rest with people. It must start with where people are and what their challenges are. You cannot have a community benefits plan that does not take into consideration that there is no access to childcare in the area or that there is no access to transportation and that the only way you can pay for transportation is if you have a job.”

Douglas added that there is nothing more important than having trusted messengers. It is key to learn who is on the ground, and their reputation with the community, especially in smaller and rural places. Niebler highlighted DOE can step in and have greater oversight as it revises the CBP process to help build and grow trust. Such an effort by DOE would include evaluating who is supporting the CBPs that are being improved and providing expertise from various sectors like housing, transportation, environment, and civic engagement. DOE can ensure that grants include trusted entities that have a direct relationship with impacted communities. Gorbea added that her fieldwork, which focused on engaging with Ford Motor Company to sign a CBA for a new electric vehicle plant in Stanton, Tennessee, has indicated a lack of transparency around the community benefits

and the spillover socioeconomic impacts of new projects. Often, the people who are the most impacted are also the ones getting the least information about how they will be impacted. She recommends that the CBA framework must be bottom-up and centered on the negotiating and bargaining processes.

The Right Time to Act

Next, Contractor asked Gorbea about how she and her team knew it was the right time to advocate for the community and work with Ford. Gorbea provided more context around the project that was announced by Ford in late 2021. In 2022, the state government tried to take over the charter in Mason, Tennessee, a small, majority-Black town, with Black leadership. Mason also has untapped groundwater reserves. The Ford electric vehicle plant would require millions of gallons of groundwater every day, and the state government wanted to make sure that Ford could access these resources.

At this point, Tennessee 4 All, the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), and the A. Philip Randolph Institute were invited by an older woman trusted by the Mason community to talk about how the community and the organizations could push back against the charter takeover. The community wanted a legally binding CBA because it would give them a real seat at the table. Hence, the community decided to push for a CBA, and Tennessee 4 All supported them. They started with about 30 people, and by October 2023, they had grown to 118 people showing up to the town hall.

According to Gorbea, one of the biggest enablers of success for this group was community leadership. This included a coalition of community members called the Blue Oval Good Neighbors; their partners, the United Auto Workers; and some community organizations. Some of these organizations have received money from Ford Motors because now the company wants to ensure they can work with the community and deliver benefits to them, including 5,000 local jobs and 20,000 supply-chain jobs. She emphasized that learning about DOE’s CBP evaluation process, and the push for CBAs as the gold standard, were leverage points that helped the community. At the same time, being invited by the community was key to their success.

Douglas admitted that he and his team did not realize that it was time to push for a CBA. It was only after they were approached by Jobs to Move America soon after the new project was announced in Birmingham that they decided to participate. That is when they formed a group called the Alabama Coalition for Community Benefits. The group included organizations serving the low-income and faith communities, such as clergy from the Anniston area. He believes the most significant step was the partnership with Alabama State University, a historically black higher education institution (Historically Black Colleges and Universities or HBCUs). A research team from the university surveyed Black residents in Alabama and Mississippi on unionization, working conditions, health

and safety, promotions, and sexual predation on women, specifically women of color.

Douglas highlighted that survey responses provided groundbreaking and eye-opening insights into what the community was facing. Using the responses from the study, his organization was able to connect with the community on the significance of a CBA and the implications for environmental justice, racial justice, health, and quality of life.

EMPOWERING COMMUNITY ORGANIZATIONS

Contractor asked the panel to comment on how community organizations can better prepare for the CBA process. Douglas responded that for accountability, trusted community organizations must be the main point of contact in the relationship-building process. He emphasized the importance of intermediaries that are not controlled by state governments in negotiations involving the federal government and local communities. Absence of such intermediaries has resulted in economic and social oppression in many communities in the South. He advocated for a whole-of-government effort that would include local decision makers.

Niebler added that paying nonprofit coalition partners is essential for long-term success because compensation enables partners to better navigate bureaucracy, perform comprehensive research, and understand the financial and legal systems around community benefits frameworks, along with the technical details of new projects. Gorbea added that such long-term building can contribute to statewide power for working people, including those who do not live in cities. Fitzgerald highlighted this is a greater challenge in the states where legislatures and governors are less committed to delivering benefits to historically underserved communities.

DISCUSSION

The panel concluded by discussing what an ideal community benefits framework should do to protect communities. Niebler emphasized that the biggest challenge is a lack of transparency, stating, “The current system is very broken and needs to totally shift.” She shared that one way communities can protect themselves is by staying informed early in the process—through word of mouth, monitoring local board and city council meeting agendas and minutes, and subscribing to state and federal email alerts about upcoming projects and grant opportunities. Douglas added that community benefits frameworks are often geared toward communities that have already experienced harm and are at risk of further harm if excluded from decision-making. He referred to these communities as “veterans of harm.”

Gorbea agreed, noting that community benefits planning offers a chance to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. Fitzgerald added that more intermediary organizations are needed to support small communities and rural towns. While current community benefits work is promising, she emphasized that it’s not happening at a large enough scale. To truly reach those who need it most and ensure a fair, competitive grant process, this work must be institutionalized. She also stressed the need for stronger infrastructure to support elected officials in acting in their community’s best interest. Too often, businesses leave once grant funding, project money, or tax incentives expire. To ensure long-term economic stability and lasting, well-paying jobs, she concluded, we must invest in building internal capacity within communities.

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