Rural Beacon Initiative (RBI) is a BIPOC led, multi-member entity, headquartered in Durham, North Carolina and serving the Southeastern United States. RBI is motivated by the knowledge that the southeast is characterized by the nation’s largest concentrations of people of color, poverty, and billion-dollar climate driven weather disasters, but also a long history of self-determination and a growing set of community driven solutions to the climate crisis.
RBI has cultivated deep working relationships in communities on the frontline of the climate crisis and has also provided consulting services with leading climate finance and clean energy solution leaders around operationalizing equity and climate and environmental justice. At its core, RBI believes that climate finance must be a pathway to social equity, and conducts research, and advocacy rooted in this principle.
To date, the organization has spearheaded strategic visioning around environmental sustainability, more efficient deployment of clean energy technology to LMI communities, and wealth generation for local community partners. RBI’s leadership team is currently involved in leading strategy for achieving equity and access for frontline communities in the deployment of a federal climate accelerator with the Coalition for Green Capital, and in developing a unique model of financing regenerative agricultural projects targeted towards rural BIPOC landowners with Croatan Institute.
Purpose
RBI seeks to advance community ownership in the new clean energy economy through:
- Strategic leveraging of a decade-worth of relationships with grassroots partners, community groups, and network contacts within the climate finance and solutions arena;
- Working with partners to identify and address preventative barriers to economic opportunity for BIPOC communities, including land and home ownership, financial literacy, and contemporary awareness;
- Direct consultation for community and LMI organizations around opportunities for wealth generation in the clean energy economy;
- Investigation and research of innovative deployment of mixed packages of sustainable technologies including energy generation, regenerative agriculture, and clean transit.
Alignment with Guiding Principles
At the Council for Inclusive Capitalism, we invite companies of all sizes, industries, and geographies to champion our Guiding Principles for Inclusive Action and demonstrate how they contribute to meaningful change. To ensure alignment with our principles, our members are assessed by at least one reporting body, sustainability-related certificate, benchmark, rating agency or similar organization.
