Practitioners' Guide to Community Lending for a Just and Equitable Energy Transition

This guide is a collection of key resources and references that provide an entry point to clean energy finance for community lending practitioners and to community development finance for green lenders. These resources detail: opportunities and challenges facing communities, different lender types, lender capital sources, community finance markets, GHG reduction approaches, investment types by technology, financing challenges and strategies, and systemwide opportunities to accelerate a just and equitable energy transition. Every lender has unique abilities, strengths, and relationships to bring to the table, critical to an equity-centered approach to GHG reduction. Our hope is to inspire the lenders best positioned to power a just and equitable transition to clean energy to double down on that work: Green Banks, CDFIs, CDCUs, MDIs, and other lenders with the requisite expertise and necessary community trust and relationships. While intended primarily for those lenders, we hope that funders, investors, policymakers, and other ecosystem players actively engaged in the work of community development and GHG reduction will find this paper useful. Wherever a lender is in their journey, this paper is designed to help them get started or further along the path toward financing just and equitable transition, through strategic collaboration.