We Want Green Too spent June 7-10 in Madison, Wisconsin, at the Mid-America Regulatory Conference (MARC) — our second year in a row at the table. MARC brings together the regional associations that oversee utility and energy regulation across 14 states, including Michigan, for several days of panels, tours, and closed-door conversation among the people who set the rules ratepayers live under.
Two members of our team made the trip: Amani Sawari, WWGT's Energy Justice Strategist, and Monica, our Community Engagement Coordinator. Both represented WWGT as part of the Community Energy Engagement Network (CEEN), the coalition of Midwest utility-justice organizations WWGT works alongside to get ratepayer concerns in front of regulators who rarely hear them directly.
Before MARC: A Room Full of Advocates
CEEN opened the week with its own gathering — a preconvening that brought together 13 energy justice organizations from across the Midwest, a day ahead of the main conference. The point was simple: compare notes before walking into rooms built for utility executives and commissioners, not community advocates.
The organizations in that room named a shared set of goals for the region: fewer rate hikes, a lower energy burden for households already stretched thin, an end to the routine debt and shutoffs that utility bills create, and limits on the data-center buildout that's starting to strain regional grids. None of that gets decided at a preconvening. But naming it together, before MARC's official sessions start, is how a coalition walks in with one voice instead of thirteen separate ones.
Inside the Conference
MARC's sessions run the way most regulatory conferences do: a panel on stage, a moderator, an audience mostly listening. WWGT's team sat in on a session billed as Women in Male-Dominated Industries — a topic that matters directly to CEEN's work, since so much of energy-justice advocacy is carried by women navigating rooms built by and for utility executives.
What our team noticed mattered as much as what was said. The panel itself was entirely white, and the discussion stayed on personal career stories rather than the harder question of who else needs a seat at that table — women of color, LGBTQ+ advocates, ratepayers who became advocates because a shutoff notice forced the issue, not because it was a career choice. The session closed without time for audience questions, a pattern that held across most of MARC's programming: panelists talked, and the room listened.
That structure is worth naming, because it's exactly the gap CEEN exists to close. A regulatory conference that only hears from people already inside the industry will keep making decisions that sound reasonable in the room and land hard on the people paying the bill. WWGT's presence at MARC — for a second year now — is one way to put a different set of experiences in front of that room.
Why Detroit Cares About a Conference in Wisconsin
MARC doesn't set Michigan's utility rates — the Michigan Public Service Commission does that. But the associations, staff, and commissioners who sit on MARC panels shape the norms and relationships that carry back into every state's rate cases, including the ones that decide what Detroit households pay DTE each month. A body that hears from advocacy groups, not just utility leadership, is more likely to weigh energy burden and shutoff risk as real costs rather than footnotes.
That's the same fight WWGT runs at home: through free weatherization, home energy audits, and direct help for households facing a shutoff notice, alongside the advocacy work that puts Detroit's experience in front of regulators who rarely hear it directly. MARC is one more room where that experience needs to be present, and WWGT plans to keep showing up.
Read about WWGT's first year at MARC — the 2025 conference in Indianapolis — in CEEN at MARC, last year's recap from the ground.
We Want Green Too is a Detroit-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit, EIN 45-5324148, founded in 2007 by Gloria J. Lowe. We build energy-efficient, healthy homes and green-economy careers for Detroit residents and veterans, and we show up in the regulatory rooms where the rules affecting Detroit ratepayers get made. Visit us at wewantgreentoo.com.
