S5E1: Funding Climate Adaptation with William Barber III and Katie Thomas

Welcome back to Climate Justice, Y'all! In this episode we're kicking off season 5 with a conversation with William Barber III from the Rural Beacon Initiative and Katie Thomas from the Congressional Progressive Caucus Center as they talk about climate justice and federal funding. Federal efforts are illegally disrupting promised financing to everyone from the Department of Education and FEMA, to local community organizations. In this episode, we will bring in two experts to discuss the impact of federal funding and “direct pay” credits for climate adaptation projects, outline the current landscape we're dealing with from a top-level, and suggest avenues we can take to continue our work and accomplish our goals. William Barber III is the founder and CEO of the Rural Beacon Initiative, a North Carolina-based social enterprise that offers private and public consultancy, strategic convening, and deployment of models for practical, scalable community based solutions in order to help businesses address the triple bottom line. Katie Thomas is the Director of Energy and Environment Programs at the Congressional Progressive Caucus Center. The Congressional Progressive Caucus Center (CPC Center) works to ensure that frontline communities have the strategic insight and tools to shape public policy and they utilize policy and process knowledge in order to educate partners, foster cross-movement solidarity, and demystify government.