Meet Catherine, our Newest Sparkler!
Portrait of Catherine Casomar with the words “Welcoming Catherine Casomar, Managing Senior Consultant Common Spark" to the right
Common Spark is excited to welcome Catherine Casomar (she/her) as our newest addition to the Sparkler Team where you’ll see her leading and supporting several of our client partners and keeping our team shining as bright as ever!
Catherine brings 15 years of experience in energy and climate and a decade operationalizing equity and justice across public, research, and nonprofit sectors.
In her most recent role as Director of the Community and Jobs team at DOE’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, Catherine ensured clean energy and climate infrastructure projects worth over $85 billion delivered local community benefits and quality jobs. Catherine is also a co-founder of the Better Data Center Project, a recipient of the 2025 JMK Innovation Prize, which works in solidarity with communities on the front lines of data center development to realize the just distribution of economic, social, and environmental costs and benefits. Catherine is excited to further develop her facilitation skills and delve deeper into California regulatory policy at Common Spark!
◆◆◆
To get to know Catherine, we asked a few sparkly questions…
What brought you to Common Spark?
The deep, foundational commitments to energy justice and the practices of learning and unlearning. I love that Common Spark is unapologetic about this commitment and unafraid to tell the hard truths.
What are you most looking forward to this year?
The last year has been full of personal and professional grief, loss, and change.
In April, I left a job that I loved at the US Department of Energy after bearing witness to our government getting taken over by authoritarians, brilliant public servants being needlessly fired and terrorized, and environmental justice programs decades in the making getting deleted overnight.
As the primary income-earner and healthcare provider in my family, this unexpected end to my job had a ripple effect—forcing us to uproot from our community in DC and move in with family halfway across the country.
In May, my mother died after a 15 year battle with Parkinson's—closing a long chapter of slow, quiet pain and opening a new chapter of grief. In August, I was diagnosed with a chronic illness.
It has been hard for me to hold and feel all of my personal grief, fear, and anger—especially alongside multiple genocides, the evisceration of social services and reproductive rights, deepening wealth inequality and engineered poverty, and all the other forms of violence we’re asked to metabolize daily.
But like all times of change and chaos, there is an opening to pause and create something different. This year helped me continue to shed the illusions of independence and control and the perfectionist, individualist narratives of white-supremacy culture. It reminded me that I am strongest, safest, and happiest when I don’t try to do everything alone and when I bring people in close especially when it feels scary. It showed me that resilience isn’t about how much I can do to protect myself from hardship, but about how a group of people can together weather storms individuals cannot. It has helped me feel more powerful and fearless because I trust that community and relationship will support us in deeper ways than institutions can.
What I am most looking forward to as this wild year comes to a close is rebuilding my home and cultivating deeper community. I want to help weave a shared social fabric that creates joy, resources, health, accountability, and real safety. I want to tend a community garden, cook food for my neighbors, invest in mutual aid networks, and share childcare with friends. As I daydream about rebuilding my home, I imagine long, slow, meandering walks down the block with my husband and toddler, where he strikes up conversations with everyone we pass by, and where we feel interconnected with, responsible for, and cared for by strangers and friends alike. And, if we’re lucky, a place to grab an ice cream or two (or three) along the way.
What does a just clean energy future mean to you?
A just clean energy future means that those bearing the brunt of harms from our existing energy system are central to designing the energy transition and are first to reap the benefits. It means that everyone has access to clean, reliable, affordable energy, and that we shift our incentives and metrics of success towards the wellbeing of people and planet.
What is your snack of choice?
Salty: dill pickle chips. Sweet: 100 Grand bar.
What song/album instantly puts you in a good mood?
Common Spark Consulting not only works externally with our clients and partners, but we also strive to work inwardly, recognizing that we must internalize the care, thoughtfulness, and intention we hope to represent as individuals and an organization. The Thought Library is where we share our ideas and thoughts, where we are at right now, on topics and issues that we hope will spark conversation for a brighter, more inclusive energy future.
