Climate Solutions Week: Onward

This coverage is made possible through a partnership between IPR and Grist, a nonprofit environmental media organization.

It’s the final day of NPR’s 2025 Climate Solutions Week. The theme of this week has been “Rethinking Home," which has brought us reporting from around the country about the ways our homes and communities can be more resilient and offer solutions to the changing climate.

IPR has been bringing you some of our conversation with Sarah Mills, director of the University of Michigan’s Center for EmPowering Communities. 

We wanted to step back from the nitty gritty and end the week with a question about hope.

Nicholas Jansen lives in Fife Lake and works on renewable energy in rural communities for the nonprofit Groundwork Center for Resilient Communities.

"As a young person, it sometimes feels very discouraging to look at what the next 50 or so years may look like," he said. "As someone in the weeds of it, what gives you hope, especially like looking at things at the statewide and local level to continue this work?"

Mills said she gets this question a lot.

And said she doesn't really have a choice. She has to hope. That's partly because she has young kids. But it's also because figuring out how to help rural areas — finding ways to achieve what people want for their communities — is part of why she went into this field.

"I studied renewable energy to understand: Is it an opportunity for rural communities?" she said. "Decarbonizing our grid, decarbonizing our entire economy, is going to require big change. But with big change can come big opportunity."

Mills lives in Ann Arbor now, but she comes from the rural village of Maybee, in southeast Michigan's Monroe County. Maybee's slogan is “The Best Little Town in Michigan," and it has a population of a little more than 500. Mills loves it there, and she said people like her parents would also welcome more opportunities.

"I feel like a lot of times people suggest, particularly in the renewable space, that, 'Oh, people just don't want change.' Like, people don't like change. I don't know 100% that that's true," she said. "I know that people love their place, but I think that most people can imagine that there's something that would make their place better." 

For families to be able to stay or move there, for instance, the community needs to jobs for parents or high-speed internet for work, as well as services like childcare.

"If we can figure out how energy infrastructure and the economic opportunities that energy infrastructure can bring gets communities like my hometown, opportunities to keep young people there, I think that changes the tenor of the conversation," Mills said. "It's not about, like, ‘Hey, rural community, will you take one for the team?’ But instead this is, ‘Can this be an opportunity to get you the things that you want?’ And so that's what gives me hope."

Conversations about energy and climate can be controversial, but Mills said they don't have to be. And moving beyond knee-jerk reactions can help work toward things we all care about.