Via EnerGaia Consulting, I provide policy, legal, and programmatic advising to values and movement-aligned formations seeking to design systems that support meeting everyone's basic needs while contributing to collective thriving. Focus areas include: energy democracy, utility justice, climate justice, and commons-based economies.

Prior projects have included:

  • Conducted research and helped draft SB 332 for Reclaim Our Power. SB 332 is California legislation that would authorize the state to study alternative public or community-owned governance models to investor-owned utilities like PG&E.
  • Conducted a landscape analysis, identified case studies, and recommended policy and organizing strategies to the Ubuntu Climate Initiative on commons-based economies and governance structures across land, water, energy, and material goods sectors.
  • Collaborated with Upright Solutions and Just Solutions Project on a memo and corresponding webinar re: how to navigate legal attacks to leading with race in climate solutions.
  • Facilitated a strategic convening for the Energy Democracy Project's leadership team.

Relevant background:

Greetings! My name is Maria Stamas, and I'm a climate justice lawyer, policy strategist, and writer. My work is dedicated to movement-aligned efforts to spark cultural change and redesign systems such that we all have the capacity to meet our basic needs and thrive together.

As Climate Policy Director for the Ubuntu Climate Initiative and founder of EnerGaia Consulting, I focus on energy, water, and land justice and their intersections with democratic governance and economies grounded in solidarity. Previsiouly, as co-founder of the People’s Utility Commons, I published a popular and political education curriculum on utility justice.

Having spent over a decade engaged in coalitional policy advocacy at the nexus of housing, energy, and utility justice, my current passion is in re-envisioning and transforming broken, oppressive systems, raising critical consciousness, and building life-affirming ways and means to live in harmony and balance with the elements and each other. 

I live on unceded Chochenyo Ohlone land in present day Oakland, California, where you can find me hiking, listening to and playing live music, and being in community.