Land & Liberty Coalition: Grantee Spotlight (Q2 2026)

Grantee spotlight: Land & Liberty Coalition

The Giving Green Fund plans to award a grant to the Land & Liberty Coalition® (L&LC) to expand its local education and stakeholder engagement campaigns focused on reducing siting and permitting barriers to clean energy deployment. L&LC is a U.S.-based project of the Conservative Energy Network (CEN), which mobilizes landowners, local officials, agricultural leaders, and community stakeholders to support proposed utility-scale clean energy projects in their own communities.

L&LC's work falls within our philanthropic strategy of unleashing clean energy in the U.S. Please see Giving Green's strategy report for more information, including recommended sub-strategies, theory of change, funding need, and key uncertainties.

Last updated: May, 2026

What Is the Land & Liberty Coalition^Ⓡ?

Founded in 2018 as a project of CEN, L&LC works to accelerate the deployment of clean energy infrastructure by helping communities across the U.S. navigate local siting and permitting processes. Its core objective is to ensure that local officials, landowners, and other community stakeholders have access to clear, credible information about clean energy development so they can make well-informed decisions.

L&LC's approach is grounded in a practical understanding that clean energy deployment does not always stall in state or federal policy, but instead in local zoning boards, county commissions, and planning processes where opposition can harden quickly when communities feel excluded or uninformed. L&LC addresses this challenge through education and early stakeholder engagement. Its signature program, "Power Hour," brings together local officials, landowners, farmers, and other trusted community stakeholders in a low-pressure environment for facilitated discussions about clean energy projects, siting processes, and community tradeoffs.

What distinguishes L&LC from other organizations is its conservative framing and its reach into communities that are often difficult for mainstream environmental organizations to engage. By working through local networks that are concerned about property rights and economic opportunity, L&LC is able to build trust and generate local support in politically diverse environments where clean energy projects face some of the steepest obstacles.

What Are We Funding, and How Could It Help Address Climate Change?

As part of our prioritized sub-strategy of addressing local siting and permitting barriers, we are funding L&LC to expand its education and stakeholder engagement work in states where large volumes of clean energy capacity are at risk of delay or cancellation due to local friction.

The grant will support three core activities:

• Convening "Power Hours" and other facilitated sessions to bring credible information about clean energy siting, land use tradeoffs, and grid reliability into communities early in the development process.
• Developing and distributing practical guidebooks and siting resources that translate complex regulatory and land use questions into accessible tools for local decision-makers.
• Sustaining in-state engagement, including travel and participation in local meetings, to ensure L&LC is present at key moments when permitting and planning decisions are made.

By helping communities improve the quality of local decision-making, L&LC's campaigns could accelerate the permitting and approval of gigawatts of clean energy capacity that would otherwise be delayed or canceled. Ultimately, this could contribute to meaningful emissions reductions from the power sector compared to the counterfactual.

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Why Do We Think the Land & Liberty Coalition^Ⓡ Will Use This Funding Well?

L&LC has built a strong track record over seven years of operation across 13 states. To date, the program estimates that its engagement and campaign portfolio have supported more than 66 GW of clean energy projects, while deploying over 2,000 guidebooks and engaging nearly 3,000 grassroots and grasstops contacts across more than 500 jurisdictions. These figures reflect both the scale of L&LC's reach and its ability to sustain engagement across a diverse set of communities and political environments.

The organization's team brings experience in field organizing, policy advocacy, and state-level political strategy. L&LC has demonstrated the ability to move quickly from initial outreach to deeper stakeholder convenings and coalition-building, with on-the-ground staff embedded in the communities where decisions are being made. We believe this model of sustained, trust-based local engagement is well-suited to reducing the kind of late-stage opposition that most commonly delays or derails clean energy projects.

The broader philanthropic ecosystem is increasingly recognizing local siting and permitting as a critical bottleneck in clean energy deployment, but funding for locally grounded, conservative-facing engagement infrastructure remains relatively scarce. Our grant aims to help L&LC strengthen its ability to create more predictable and locally supported pathways for clean energy infrastructure to be sited, permitted, and built during a time when restrictions on clean energy are growing.

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Giving Green believes that additional climate donations are likely to be most impactful when directed to our Top Climate Nonprofits. For several reasons, we may choose to recommend grants to other organizations for work that we believe is at least as impactful as grants to our top recommendations. We are highlighting this grant to offer transparency to donors to the Giving Green Fund, as well as to provide a resource for donors who are particularly interested in this impact strategy. This is a nonpartisan analysis (study or research) and is provided for educational purposes.