How cohorts shaped the Community Energy Ambassadors program

The Ambassador program’s development has been shaped – and will continue to be shaped – by the needs and the wisdom shared by Ambassadors across the state. 

Before the Community Energy Ambassadors program existed, CERTs developed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) Ambassadors program to help neighbors keep each other informed on emerging federal clean energy incentives. Our early experience with the IRA Ambassadors was filled with excitement…and also some lessons learned, as experience reminded us that sharing information on incentives for something like heat pumps is only useful if the people are also familiar enough with the technology to make an informed decision on how it might work for them. 

So in early 2024, we launched the Community Energy Ambassadors program, expanding beyond incentives to include more comprehensive training on clean energy. We offered two flexible learning pathways: a self-directed route for independent learners, and a cohort route designed as a collaborative team effort.

For our pilot cohort, we invited several Minnesota organizations focused on housing to a series of online trainings, facilitated by CERTs, and culminating in an in-person session where they scoped out projects to serve their communities. We hoped they would connect with and learn from each other before they went off to pursue their projects. 

In St. James, Minn., a Community Energy Ambassadors cohort became a model of the collective chemistry that makes cohorts successful. Two local groups, Climate Smart St. James and Convivencia Hispana, tapped into their existing networks with community members to make clean energy information accessible in a culturally relevant way. Instead of watching training videos alone, they transformed the training into collaborative, bilingual workshops, filled with live Spanish interpretation, shared meals, and fruitful discussion. 

As participant Luisa Trapero says, “Doing the training as a community brought together different thoughts and was more beneficial than doing the training on your own. The information was phenomenal, and it was great to get it all in a simplified form. This training should be done with more communities.” 

The St. James' cohort shows how collaborative learning can lead to community-led projects. To become CERTified, they tackled clean energy challenges within their communities by splitting into three smaller action groups, and then came back together as a cohort to celebrate when they became CERTified Community Energy Ambassadors.

We learned from St. James that when neighbors learn together, they don't just absorb information, they root it into local priorities, turning shared education into community action and celebrating wins together.

The cohort model continued to expand beyond our original model, with community members taking the training together to empower themselves and move local initiatives forward.

Energy Verde represents a cross-section of Latine community leadership. As the group worked through the Community Energy Ambassadors training during 2025, they found themselves coming back to a shared question: How can we share this information within our communities and make it relevant for specific groups, like renters? They developed renter-specific guides that support clean energy efforts and continue to gather insight from stakeholders across the housing sector on how to make the resources relevant.

At a Brooklyn Park Juneteenth celebration, Citizens Climate Lobby of Minneapolis engaged attendees with energy-saving ideas and clean energy topics for their CERTified project. They combined resources from CERTs and Home Energy Squad with trivia and kids’ games to build stronger connections within the communities they were engaging.

These early cohorts, including one in Fergus Falls cohosted by West Central Initiative and CERTs, influenced the development of the Community Energy Ambassadors cohort model. Informed and inspired by these communities, we redeveloped our overall training into an interactive, online platform that incorporates self-directed and group-led approaches, along with easy ways to engage with others while completing the training.

“What’s important about our approach is that we listened to the ideas and feedback we received from community members and we found ways to incorporate it into the working model to benefit future Ambassadors,” says Melissa Birch, CERTs Co-Director.

Our goal is to engage more residents from all 87 Minnesota counties to learn practical energy-saving ideas that can support the challenges present in their communities around energy, safety, and comfort.

In 2026, our Regional Coordinators are gathering people for cohorts so that each Minnesota CERT region will have a team of aspiring Ambassadors, guided by CERTs staff on their journey to learn about and share clean energy information in their communities. They will all develop community-based projects on their way to becoming CERTified Community Energy Ambassadors. Stay tuned for updates on the cohort members and their ideas. 

And, of course, we hope that becoming CERTified is not the end of Ambassadors’ clean energy journeys, but rather a foundation for them to support their communities on clean energy for many years to come.