“They were expanding their team to do energy audits in people’s homes, which sounded thrilling to me to be able to do that,” Kelley said. “And so, I went through the interview process and fortunately, I was one of the folks selected to be on their team. It was a fairly new field. There were not degrees in it. And you didn’t need to be an engineer to do the work because it was a computerized energy audit. So they were looking for people with good people skills and communication skills and high interest in learning the technical aspects. I guess I checked all of those boxes and indeed I had the passion to check all of those boxes.”

Kelly got right on it.

“We had a team of 10-12 energy auditors who would go out into people’s homes and do these audits to help them understand what they could do to reduce their energy use and lower their energy bills as well,” Kelley said. “And over time, that kind of evolved into having incentives to have people do certain actions like replace certain equipment. And over time, that became a statewide program. But we still maintained that customer relationship and we are still there to make sure that customers have the information they need in order to control their energy use and manage their energy bills.”

Back in the early 1980s, Madison was still a rather homogenous community. The waves of people coming to Madison in search of a better life with economic opportunity hadn’t begun yet. There was no Simpson Street or Allied Drive yet. But Madison’s communities of color were growing and Madison’s demographic make-up was beginning to evolve. And Kelley, the director of the Residential Community Services division at MGE began to take note.

“Our community was evolving, Kelley said. “It was evolving and changing demographically. And so I realized that we needed to understand the whole array, the beautiful array and diversity of our demographics and how do we get information to everyone in the community. That’s when I started attending some community events. MGE would be a sponsor and so I would go to the event. And I got to know people like the late LaMarr Billups, Steve Braunginn, Kaleem Caire and Juan José López. They helped me see how MGE could be a part of the community. I heard from people about expectations for me personally and MGE, how MGE could become more a part of the community. And what we do and the area that I work in how we could be more connected to customers and how we can go to places and spaces that they are already comfortable in and bring our information and have partnerships with community organizations.”

MGE could no longer passively wait for the community to come to it with energy issues. It had to go out and engage Madison’s diverse communities.

“It was just one of those things that started off as a small idea,” Kelley said. “But I think because it was the right idea to follow our roots in the community and expand on those and start having these relationships and partnerships that are mutually beneficial. They don’t just benefit MGE. They don’t just benefit those individual customers who were working with us. It’s building community capacity in support of community organizations.”

And while MGE was forging working partnerships with non-profits of color and other organizations, it also began to dawn on Kelley that MGE wasn’t necessarily in the spaces where the people with the greatest needs resided. And it became important that MGE had to do more than have relationships with communities of color. It had to reflect the people whom it was trying to reach.

“I commissioned a study about our low-wage, low-income customers to find out a little more about their relationship to energy, how it impacts their lives and understand their relationship with MGE and the information we are trying to get out to people to help them control those bills,” Kelley said. “Is it reaching them? And actually, that study revealed that they have high energy burdens. That means they are spending a higher proportion of their income on energy than other households. And we measure that as being six percent or higher. So they had higher energy burdens. And they tended to not be as familiar with MGE’s information that we have to offer than ‘non-low-income’ customers. That really signaled to us that we needed to do something different than what we were doing. And so, we got more focused to target customers whom we traditionally weren’t reaching. That tended to be communities of color and communities who are low-income, low-wage households. That changed what we did. We did another research project in the late 1990s or early 2000s with what we would have called at that time ‘Hispanic customers.’ It was difficult at the time to even identify who might be Hispanic or Latino customers. We did our best to do that and to get some insights. Again, it was like, ‘Augh, our information isn’t reaching those customer groups and it needs to. And we want to make sure it is getting to those customer groups.’“

Kelley realized that she need to diversify her staff if MGE was going to make an impact.

“We also started looking at our own team and as we had vacancies in our team, we supplemented our energy expertise with cultural and linguistic expertise so that we could have people on the team who understood Madison’s Black community,” Kelley said. “Who are the players there who are reaching their community leaders and organizations? And how does that work in the Latino community? There was a time where we could really shift it from just looking at energy expertise on our team to also looking at other kinds of expertise so that we could have a whole package to make sure that we are giving good information to all of our customers. When I say all, I mean the whole beautiful diversity of customers.”

And eventually the likes of Annette Miller, Mayra Medrano and later Mario Garcia Sierra joined the ranks of MGE and began to change the face of the company, at least in the Residential Community Services division where most members of Madison’s communities of color interacted with MGE.