Giving Compass' Take:

• The team at Grist report on the Navajo Equitable Economy initiative, a plan for the future of clean water and water rights, transition assistance from utilities, renewable electricity generation, and, ultimately, "a Navajo-led energy sector that diversifies the Navajo economy."

• How donors put more emphasis on Native American equity?

• Here's an article on bringing global social innovation home to the Navajo Nation. 

When the smokestacks of the Navajo Generating Station wheezed their final puffs and the coal plant at last closed its doors in 2019, more than 400 workers lost their jobs. Upwards of 90 percent of them were Diné (Navajo). For the Navajo Nation, which had leased the land on which the generating station was built, the November shuttering of the plant also meant losing $30 to $50 million in annual revenue.

The generating station’s 13 terawatt-hours of yearly electricity production had been fueled by lumps of coal from Peabody Energy’s Kayenta Mine, a surface mine a short train ride away. Without the plant burning its coal, there was no longer a need for the mine either. It, too, would close, and with it went more jobs. These losses are felt even more acutely in the age of COVID-19, when employment and economic stability are ever more uncertain.

But in this difficult and dramatic end of a nearly 50-year era, Robyn Jackson sees an opportunity. Jackson is the climate and energy outreach director at Diné Citizens Against Ruining our Environment (Diné CARE), a Navajo-led environmental justice organization. To her and others, the closure represents a new chance to invest in clean energy on a meaningful scale.

Perhaps more importantly, it’s an opportunity to hear from the voices regularly excluded from the kinds of policy-making processes that determine an economy’s energy mix: voices from frontline communities most heavily hit by the pollution and environmental degradation that are generated along with the power.

Read the full article about a renewable future on the Navajo Nation by Grist Creative at Grist.