SEFRA Initiative

Every home.
Lasting power.

SEFRA delivers home and commercial energy upgrades, solar, and clean-energy workforce training — starting in Maryland, DC, and Virginia, with a model built to scale nationwide. Lower bills for the building. Real trade skills for the neighborhood. Verified results for the programs that fund the work.

Explore our programs Join a training cohort

Why now

The tax credits that used to help are gone. The programs that replace them are the way in now.

As of 2026, the federal tax credits households used for solar, heat pumps, and insulation have ended. State and county energy programs are now the entire path to an affordable upgrade — and for many of them, enrolling sooner means a better deal than enrolling later. SEFRA helps you find and use that path before the window narrows.

What this means for your home

Four program lines

01

Homes

Energy retrofits and solar for income-qualified households, funded through state and county programs. Most homeowners pay nothing.

For homeowners →
02

Commercial

Energy retrofits, solar, and storage for commercial and multifamily buildings — the same delivery model, scaled to larger properties.

Commercial →
03

Data

Every project adds to a public picture of how our neighborhoods use energy, so communities can plan and apply for what's next.

Community data →
04

Training

Coming soon

Paid training on real projects. Trainees earn site hours on the same roofs and mechanical rooms we're upgrading.

Training →

How it works

Three steps, one intake.

1

Check your home.

Upload your documents once. We check you against every program you might qualify for — not just one — and find the best combination.

2

We do the work.

Licensed crews, scheduled around you. Insulation, heat pumps, electrical, solar — whatever the assessment shows.

3

Your bill drops.

You get the before/after numbers for your own home. The work is covered by the programs you qualified for.

Thesis

Built to deliver, not to pass through.

SEFRA takes public energy funding and turns it directly into finished homes and trained workers. One organization, accountable for the whole chain: the outreach, the eligibility check, the install, the training hours, and the verified results reported back to the program.

Ready to start? Learn what your home could get, or talk to us about a training spot.

For homeowners Apply to train

Program 01 — Homes

Your home, upgraded. Usually at no cost.

Maryland and DC fund energy upgrades for income-qualified households. SEFRA does the work: assessment, installation, paperwork, all of it.

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Timing

Why timing matters now.

The federal tax credits that used to cover solar and efficiency upgrades ended in 2026. State and county programs are now the way these upgrades get paid for — and some of them are better the earlier you enroll. Waiting a year can mean the same upgrade on worse terms. The five-minute check tells you where you stand today.

Scope

What you could get.

Depending on your home and the programs you qualify for:

  • Insulation and air sealing that cut heating and cooling waste
  • A modern heat pump for heating and cooling
  • Electrical panel and wiring upgrades where needed
  • Rooftop solar that lowers your monthly bill
  • Health and safety fixes that come up during the work

One intake

One check, every program you qualify for.

Most programs make you apply one at a time, and most households never find out about the ones they missed. SEFRA works differently. You give us your information once. We check it against every Maryland and DC program you might be eligible for, figure out the best combination, and make sure no single upgrade gets double-counted or double-billed. You get one answer: here's what your home qualifies for, and here's who pays for what.

Eligibility

Eligibility is based on household income and where you live. Income limits differ by household size and county, and some programs count income differently than your tax return does.

Skip the guesswork: get in touch and we'll tell you where you stand.

Talk to us

What it costs

If you qualify, the funded work costs you nothing. If part of your project falls outside the programs you qualify for, we tell you the number before any work starts. No surprises on the back end.

Questions

Common questions.

Do I have to repay anything?

No. Grant-funded work is not a loan or a lien. If a specific program works differently, we say so in writing before you sign.

I rent. Can I apply?

Some programs cover rental properties with the owner's participation. Start the check and we'll route it.

Do I have to apply to a bunch of different programs myself?

No — that's the point. You give us your documents once and we check every program for you.

Who does the actual work?

Licensed, insured crews. Some include SEFRA trainees working under supervision; you'll always know who's on site.

How long does it take?

We give you a scheduling window as soon as you qualify, and we hold to it. Most installs are 1 to 3 days in the home.

Program 02 — Commercial

Your building, cheaper to run — and in compliance.

SEFRA brings funded, verified energy delivery to commercial and multifamily properties: efficiency retrofits, solar, storage, and EV charging — plus the benchmarking and performance reporting large buildings now owe.

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Scope

What we deliver.

Scoped to the building and the incentives it qualifies for:

  • Efficiency retrofits — lighting, HVAC, controls, and building envelope
  • Rooftop, canopy, or ground-mount solar sized to the load
  • Battery storage for demand-charge savings and resilience
  • EV charging for tenants, fleets, and visitors
  • Benchmarking and building-performance-standard reporting, handled

One assessment, every incentive.

We assess the building once and line up every commercial program, incentive, and credit it qualifies for — state and utility programs, the federal clean-electricity credit, storage and resilience grants, and solar renewable-energy credits — into one funded package, with no measure double-counted.

Compliance, handled in the same pass.

Maryland, Montgomery County, and DC now hold large buildings to benchmarking and building-performance standards. SEFRA measures the building, delivers the upgrades, and reports verified results — so the work that lowers your operating cost is the same work that keeps you compliant.

Affordable & mixed-income multifamily.

Where a building serves income-qualified residents, the same grant-funded pathways behind our Homes program can cover much of the work — at building scale. We check both the commercial and the income-qualified side and combine what fits.

How it's funded.

A mix of incentives, state and utility programs, the federal clean-electricity credit, and financing — with grant dollars where the building qualifies. We model the number, and the payback, before any work starts.

Thesis

The upgrade, the savings, and the proof — measured once.

Most buildings hire one firm to install, another to benchmark, and a third to verify. SEFRA does all three as a single instrumented pass: the same measurement that scopes the work proves the savings and satisfies the compliance filing. One record, audit-ready, for the owner and the program alike.

Questions

Common questions.

Is my multifamily property residential or commercial?

For affordable and mixed-income multifamily, income-qualified programs can fund much of the work — the same pathways as our Homes program, at building scale. We check both sides and combine what fits.

Do you handle the benchmarking and compliance filing?

Yes. Measurement, verification, and reporting are part of the delivery, not a separate vendor.

How is the work paid for?

A mix of incentives, state and utility programs, the federal clean-electricity credit, and financing — with grant dollars where the building serves income-qualified residents. We model the number and the payback before work starts.

Do you work outside Maryland, DC, and Virginia?

Those are where we start. The delivery-and-verification model is built to travel, and we take on commercial work elsewhere case by case.

Program 04 — Training

Status: in development — first cohort not yet scheduled

Learn the trade on a real roof.

SEFRA's training program pays you to learn clean-energy and building trades on live projects: actual homes, actual installs, actual site hours toward your credentials.

The pitch

Classroom-only programs hand you a certificate and a job search. Ours hands you a work history.

Trainees join SEFRA crews on funded retrofit and solar projects across Maryland and DC. You log supervised hours on insulation, heat pump installation, electrical, and solar. You finish with a wage record, real site hours, and contractors who've watched you work.

Facts

What we can say today

The program is in design with our training partners. Cohort length, the wage, the credentials you'll earn, and the first start date are being set now — we'll publish each one here when it's fixed, and not before.

What's already settled: training happens on live SEFRA projects, trainees are paid from their first day on site, and no one pays us to enroll.

Tell us you're interested

Who it's for

If you've been told you need experience to get experience, this is the answer to that.

No experience required. We're looking for people from the neighborhoods we work in who want a trade, show up, and can do physical work.

Program 03 — Data

Your neighborhood's energy picture, in your neighborhood's hands.

Every SEFRA project generates data: what homes needed, what the work cost, what bills did after. We treat that as a public asset.

The argument

Energy money flows to communities that can document their need and prove their results.

Most neighborhoods can't, because nobody's collecting the picture on their behalf.

There's a working model for this in a different field: public budgets used to be impossible for ordinary people to see, until independent groups started publishing them in plain, comparable form — and that transparency changed who could hold the money accountable. SEFRA brings the same idea to home energy. We publish anonymized, neighborhood-scale data from our work: housing-condition patterns, energy use before and after upgrades, and where the next dollar would do the most. Community groups, local governments, and residents can use it to plan, organize, and apply.

Publishing

What we publish, when live

  • Neighborhood energy snapshots, published after our first wave of projects
  • Before/after results from completed SEFRA projects, aggregated
  • Plain-language guides to the energy programs Maryland and DC households can use right now

About

Public energy programs succeed or fail on delivery.

SEFRA Initiative (Sustainable Energy for Resilience and Access) is a nonprofit working across Maryland, DC, and Virginia.

Who we are

We started with a simple observation from inside the work: public energy programs succeed or fail on delivery. The funding exists. What's scarce is an organization that can take an award and turn it into finished homes, trained workers, and clean reporting, without layers in between.

SEFRA was founded and is led by Suad Hasan, whose career has been spent making public money transparent and accountable to the people it serves. It's built to hold the work directly: SEFRA takes the award, delivers the installs, trains the workforce, and reports verified results itself — rather than passing public funding through layers of intermediaries.

Leadership

Suad Hasan

Founder & Executive Director

Suad has spent over a decade making public money transparent and accountable — much of it at the International Budget Partnership in Washington, DC, working on the Open Budget Survey, the leading independent assessment of budget transparency, and providing technical assistance to civil-society groups and governments. Closer to home, she has contributed to Montgomery County's Climate Action Plan and its climate-accountability work. She holds a BA in Economics and an MA in International Relations from American University's School of International Service, and began her career as a journalist.

That's the same job SEFRA does, in a different domain: making energy-program delivery transparent and accountable to the households it's meant to serve.

Governance

How we're governed.

SEFRA is governed by an independent board with a written conflict-of-interest policy. SEFRA runs its intake, eligibility, and verification on software and digital-twin technology contributed at no cost by ThresholdStack — SEFRA pays ThresholdStack nothing. Where a relationship exists between SEFRA's leadership and ThresholdStack, it is disclosed, documented, and any related decision is approved by board members with no financial or family tie to either party. Our financials and program results are published annually.

Our board is being seated now. Directors and their affiliations will be published here, along with our financials and program results.

Funders & partners

A grantee built for delivery — and for proof.

SEFRA exists to take residential energy funding the last mile: qualified households found, work installed, workforce trained, and results reported back to your standard, automatically.

Talk to us

Why SEFRA

Six things a program officer can check.

Delivery track record.

SEFRA's delivery runs on technology and a team that have implemented Maryland Energy Administration residential programs end to end — homeowner intake and income qualification, contractor management, install delivery, and monthly grant reporting under state requirements — contributed by ThresholdStack. Our Executive Director has worked that delivery firsthand.

One intake, every program.

SEFRA collects a household record once and evaluates it against every program it might qualify for, with a measure-level ledger so the same upgrade is never funded twice. Stacked delivery, clean anti-double-dipping, one audit-ready answer per household.

Audit-grade reporting, built in.

Every eligibility determination produces an evidence chain, not just a yes/no — the documents relied on, the values extracted, each requirement checked, with a timestamp. When an auditor asks you to prove a household was eligible, the answer takes one click, not one week.

Clean money handling.

Dedicated grant-receipt, operating, and reserve accounts per award, with documented controls and reporting built for program auditors — modeled on structures already operating under live MEA grants.

One award, three outcomes.

Every funded project produces a finished home, paid training hours, and neighborhood-level data. Funders get triple impact per dollar without managing three vendors.

Honest pipeline.

We'll tell you what we can deliver this year and what we can't. Placeholder commitments don't make it into our applications.

Partnership lanes

Five ways to work with us.

01

State and county programs

SEFRA as direct grantee or named subgrantee for residential energy equity, weatherization-adjacent, and workforce funding.

02

Utility low-income programs

SEFRA as a delivery network partner where utility efficiency dollars reach low-income households through community organizations.

03

Philanthropy

General operating and capacity support that public awards can't cover — and that make public applications stronger.

04

Training partners

Community colleges, apprenticeship sponsors, and unions who want a live-project pipeline for their candidates.

05

Contractors

Licensed trade partners who want steady, funded residential work with clean scopes.

Talk to us

Contact

Talk to us.

Tell us which of these you are and what you need. A real person reads every message, and we answer the ones we can't help with too — usually by pointing you somewhere that can.

Who's writing

What to include, so we can actually help.

Homeowners

Your address, roughly how many people live in the household, and what's wrong — high bills, a failing system, cold rooms. You don't need documents to start the conversation.

Commercial & multifamily

Property address, square footage, number of units if it's residential, and whether you're facing a benchmarking or building-performance deadline.

Training applicants

Where you live and whether you've done physical or trade work before. No experience is required and no résumé is needed — we'll tell you when the first cohort has a date.

Funders & program officers

The program or opportunity you have in mind and its timeline. We'll tell you plainly whether we can deliver it in that window.

Contractors & trade partners

Your trades, license and insurance status, and the counties you cover.

Press

Your outlet and deadline. We don't have impact numbers to share yet — when we do, they'll be real ones.

Where we are

SEFRA Initiative

909 Rose Avenue, Suite 400
North Bethesda, MD 20852

We work across Maryland, DC, and Virginia. The model is built to travel, and we take on work elsewhere case by case.