Power to the People

April 10, 2025

Rob Burton, co-founder and executive director of SWEET Alabama, knew from birth that life wasn’t fair. Born with cystic fibrosis (CF), he spent his first three years alternately staying two weeks in the hospital, then two weeks at home. “I was always taught growing up ‘not to let it define me,’” he says. “But as I grew older, I came to terms with the fact that it did, absolutely, define who I am — my understanding of the world.”

When Burton was born in 1989, life expectancy for people with his condition was around age 30. CF is a “full-body disease,” he explains. It affects the lungs, gallbladder, pancreas, and digestive tract. It brings with it Type 1 diabetes, constant blood sugar monitoring, careful dieting, frequent medication use, fatigue, and brain fog.

Nonetheless, his condition inspired him to start volunteering, and he began fundraising for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation in the sixth grade. A few years later, his father, who was an alcoholic and a cocaine addict, took his own life. That proved to be a second catalyst for Burton’s efforts to help others in need.

“Between the pain in my own life, related to my father and my cystic fibrosis, I didn’t want others to be feeling pain as well,” Burton says. “Getting involved in community work was a way to begin hopefully addressing things.”

Burton attended college at the University of Alabama in Birmingham, which has one of the best CF clinics in the country. But he soon discovered that Birmingham also had some of the worst air pollution in the nation. “My lung health immediately started to take a dive,” he says. One of his CF doctors, who was also the head of Environmental and Translational Medicine for UAB, told him that local air pollution could be causing many of his respiratory symptoms. That challenge inspired yet another direction for Burton’s activism, and he got involved in political campaigns addressing environmental justice.

After graduating, Burton went to work for a local nonprofit called Magic City Agriculture Project. Its main focus was sustainable agriculture, but the group also helped develop and strengthen local economies. “It was an alternative to … gentrification so that communities can control their own resources, control their own food production, and [be] able to do so in a sustainable way,” he explains.

Some four years later, that experience with community building inspired him to help launch his own nonprofit, SWEET Alabama. Its most immediate goal is retrofitting homes to make them more energy efficient. The acronym, which stands for “Sustainable Water, Energy & Economic Transition,” was suggested by his cofounder  Susan Diane Mitchell. Mitchell — like many of the organization’s early leaders and volunteers — is a woman, which makes it doubly appropriate that “HER” is the industry-wide acronym for Home Energy Retrofit.

Rob Burton's nonprofit SWEET Alabama stands for “Sustainable Water, Energy & Economic Transition.”

Alabama has the highest energy bills in the country, according to a 2024 study by WalletHub. Burton notes that helping clients make their homes more energy-efficient allows them to use the savings “to put food on their table, buy books to send their kids to school, or save for their future. It also takes that money, which is currently being drained from our communities … and brings it back.”

However, because of his own health history, Burton stresses that delivering safe, reliable energy is critical for reasons beyond just saving money — particularly in Alabama, where the power company is among the largest lobbyists in the state. Its corporate parent, Atlanta-based Southern Company, is among the largest lobbyists in the nation and has spent millions of dollars fighting clean air regulation and supporting groups that have spread climate disinformation, according to the Energy and Policy Institute, an industry watchdog organization.

And here’s another grim “number one” statistic for Alabamians: the Miller Electric Generating Plant tops the EPA’s list as the nation’s worst greenhouse gas polluter. Located on the north ridge of Birmingham, the coal plant’s emissions spill down into the valley below, affecting residents’ livelihood on a daily basis, says Burton.

“They’re able to [have] such a profit margin because they control our state politics,” Burton says. “And if we don’t create alternatives, then that will continue to have that ripple effect, not just on our local communities, on our state, but it will continue having that effect nationally.”

These and other environmental hazards disproportionately affect people of color in Alabama. Many The homes of many Black residents aren’t properly connected to sewage systems, resulting in overflows that pose serious health risks. Coal ash — containing arsenic, lead and radioactive elements — has been dumped at the Arrowhead Landfill next to Black residents’ homes. And Bluestone Coke, a now-shuttered Birmingham plant, has been sued for violating the Clean Water Act and is identified as one of several superfund sites in Alabama by the EPA.

SWEET believes that if communities work together, they can create their own solutions — which will fuel change in state and national policy. They witnessed this firsthand in a small way when they initially received their nonprofit status in March 2020. Because of the pandemic shutdown, they couldn’t enter people’s homes. So, they focused on the policy part of their mission, which includes surveying residents to identify needs. SWEET would use the results to design their programming. In the first two weeks, they gathered 2.7 times more survey results than the city had in a couple of months, says Burton.

“[Our work] is also about relationship building and being able to have these discussions about … why our energy bills are the way that they are,” Burton says. “About what their issues are in their community that go beyond housing.”

So, what does retrofitting mean? On a basic level, it is finding anywhere that air could be leaking out of the home, through cracks in baseboards or disconnected ducts for example, and sealing those up. This prevents conditioned air from leaking outdoors.

A basic retrofit can decrease energy use by up to 20 percent. More extensive retrofits — which require replacing windows or other fixtures — are more expensive but can deliver up to a 79 percent decrease. Burton says his group typically expects to lower energy bills by around 10 to 20 percent. Moreover, it only costs SWEET around $150 on average to retrofit a home, a service they provide free of charge to clients in need. Their work also includes hosting training events, lending tools, and distributing retrofit kits so that people can update houses themselves.

While switching to renewable sources like solar energy is certainly critical and is perhaps a future goal, Burton says retrofitting is more cost-effective and accessible for now. 

Twenty-year-old Xida Burroughs is a member of SWEET’s HER Street Team, which does the actual physical work of retrofitting, and has served both in a volunteer capacity and as the paid Street Team Lead. “A lot of the technical stuff is beyond me, all I know how to do is just fix it,” they say with a laugh.

Burroughs described one of their first experiences when they, along with Burton, had to army crawl beneath a house to find the places in need of repair. “Crawl spaces are nasty. They’re gross,” they say, but doing this work “feels great.”

Sherrette Spicer — or Lady Freedom as she’s known to her neighbors — is the Energy Equity Organizer for SWEET. She’s been involved in community organizing for years, once serving as chairwoman of the Black Panther Party for the state of Alabama. At church, she even took in a young girl who asked Spicer if she would “be her mama.” Spicer says with a laugh: “She adopted me.”

A self-proclaimed “hustler,” Spicer picks up security gigs, makes DoorDash deliveries, and does nails. Before she got involved with SWEET, she didn’t appreciate the importance of the work. But Burton, whom she already knew through various community activities, asked her to help. “Rob has his hands in 80 million things,” Spicer says. “It could have been picking pumpkins for whatever cause, and I would have come.”

Volunteering is where Spicer’s work with SWEET began. Her first assignment was replacing electrical socket covers for an elderly woman who was physically unable to bend over and do it herself. “To me, that let me know really fast that this is something important, [something] that really helps people,” she stresses.

After her own home was retrofitted, Spicer witnessed the profound impact firsthand. How much did her monthly bills decrease after the job? “Honey, I’m gonna tell you exactly,” she says. “It went from $156 the year before to $68 bucks. I thought my bill was wrong.”

Spicer says she can see the shock on people’s faces when she tells them they’re going to help and do it for free. “Alabama Power isn’t gonna do anything. The person who built your house isn’t gonna do anything,” Burroughs says. “We’re the people that if you have a problem, we’ll come in and fix it.”

“Mutual aid is you help me, I help you — and you don’t even necessarily have to help me,” Spicer says. “But we can help each other.”

This type of spirit is what inspired E Pluribus Unum (EPU), a New Orleans-based nonprofit that supports community leadership throughout the South, to select Burton for this year’s fellowship cohort, which is focusing on environmental stewardship. “EPU’s mission is to break down barriers of race and class across the South,” says Madeleine McLain, Communications Coordinator for EPU. “We work to change divisive narratives that perpetuate systemic and interpersonal racism.”

The 18-month-long program begins with a learning phase, connecting fellows with different partners to give them a full equity lens and to encourage collaboration. EPU then helps the fellows implement projects to meet community needs and advance equity.

“What [Burton] wants is for folks in the area … to realize that they can do things to positively impact their own health and their lives overall, that are good for the environment and good for them,” McLain says.

In turn, SWEET has launched its own fellowship for young people, the Green Economies Youth Fellowship, which pays people between the ages of 16 and 24 to learn the skills of retrofitting and have discussions around environmental justice.

For the communities it serves, SWEET’s story deepens and broadens from an environmental lens to one of race, poverty, housing and justice. It is an entry point into conversations that may not otherwise have happened. SWEET is a showcase of who Alabama is, beyond the stereotype, and what Alabama could become, beyond historic precedent, says Burton. Citing the familiar 1974 song by Lynyrd Skynyrd, he says: “​​We have multiple different community folks we work with that tend to call us ‘Sweet Home Alabama.’”

Ada Wood is an Atlanta-based reporter who has contributed to Atlanta magazine, Georgia Public Broadcasting, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. and CNN.

Wes Frazer makes photographs. When he’s not making photographs you may find him swimming in rivers, fly fishing, or playing with his dog, Ralph.