Navigating our Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund Materials

Article

Sep 4

Given the complex interplay between GGRF programs, awardees, and the CDFI industry we have created a variety of resources to improve our understanding of the program. Below is a collection of concise and useful summaries, memos, and blog posts created by synthesizing the information currently available on the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.

Getting Started

To best understand the program, we recommend starting with the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund basics document, which provides a broad overview of each of the program’s three funding programs:

Clean Community Investment Accelerator (CCIA)
Solar for All (SFA)
National Clean Investment Fund (NCIF)

From there, the Clean Communities Investment Accelerator (CCIA) rules and definitions document details the types of entities that qualify as community lenders under the GGRF, and what sorts of projects are allowed and where. This focus on the CCIA reflects the fact that we are thinking primarily about CDFIs, which are most likely to participate in the GGRF through the CCIA.

From there, if you’re interested in learning more about the GGRF, we recommend you read through our blog posts, which can be found on the CDFI Friendly America website but are also, more conveniently, located under the “Blog Posts” heading within this document. These posts were drafted with the intention of being easily digestible, and detail the components of the GGRF program that are least familiar to the CDFI industry.

After reading those documents, please feel free to peruse the rest in the way that suits you.

Other Resources

Regarding the three GGRF financing arms, we detailed the particular plans of each of the programs’ recipients (except under SFA, where we limited my summaries to recipients that plan to be active in CFA states). If you are interested in learning more about a particular recipient’s plans, consider starting with the shorter summaries (which, on average, are about 1.5 pages) and then moving on to the deeper dive documents (which, on average, are about 6 pages). Before reading about SFA and NCIF recipients, we would recommend starting with the NCIF rules and definitions and the SFA rules and definitions documents.

The documents linked under the Background/Other section provide information that is not necessarily essential to understanding how the GGRF works, but may be useful depending on the specific interests that you may have. For example, GGRF falls under President Biden’s Justice40 initiative, which establishes the goal that 40% of the benefits of certain federal investments should flow to disadvantaged communities. Additionally, GGRF procurement policies related to CCIA recipients, in particular, will likely affect technical assistance contractors (potentially including CDFI Friendly organizations) under the CCIA program.