Overcoming Today’s Friction to Unlock Tomorrow’s Opportunities

Kerry C. Duggan is a nationally recognized policy leader, strategist, founder, corporate board director and global public speaker with over two decades of experience working at the vital intersection of environmental stewardship and economic development. She specializes in translating complex policy into execution, leveraging deep expertise in place-based community engagement to break the silos that prevent markets and governments from acting at speed.

In 2017, Kerry founded Energy Security Partners (ESP.earth), a strategic advisory firm counseling CEOs, boards, investors, and public-sector leaders on energy security, resilience, and complex system strategy. She operates in high-stakes environments where execution risk is paramount. She is on the corporate boards of Perma-Fix (NASDAQ: PESI) and BlueGreen Water Technologies, and on advisory boards including Arctaris Impact Investors and Commonweal Ventures. She was previously a Partner at the firm of Hon. Tom Ridge. 

Kerry’s career is anchored by service at the highest levels of the U.S. government. At the White House, she served as Deputy Director for Policy to then-Vice President Joe Biden and as Deputy Director of President Barack Obama's Detroit Federal Working Group, coordinating over 20 federal agencies, proving that execution at scale is possible, even under extreme constraints, by prioritizing community engagement over top-down approaches. At the U.S. Department of Energy, she held senior roles including Director of Legislative, Regulatory & Urban Affairs, and later served on the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board under Secretary Granholm.

A three-time appointee of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Kerry serves on the Michigan Council on Climate Solutions and the inaugural Detroit Women’s Commission (fmr Mayor Duggan appointee). 

Her work today is driven by this core thesis: the Great Lakes, anchored by Detroit, represent a unique region of long-term stability. As market and physical risk reshape migration patterns, Kerry advances a deliberate “receiver-city” strategy to ensure growth strengthens communities rather than displacing them.

A former Division I basketball player at St. John’s University and the University of Vermont, Kerry earned her B.S. from UVM and her M.S. from the University of Michigan, where she now has a faculty appointment at the School for Environment and Sustainability.

She was the one coaches wanted on the court when the team was down with only seconds on the clock. Not much has changed.

Complex System Strategy:

• Strategic Alignment & Executive Advisory: We accelerate infrastructure deployment by aligning decision-makers across public, private, and institutional sectors. By connecting clients with an unmatchable global network, we ensure that leaders operating on different incentives and timelines can translate strategy into coordinated action.
• Real-Time Problem Solving: We provide trusted counsel during moments of friction or inflection when timelines are compressed or conditions change. This includes our 30/90 Day Strategic Sprints—a rapid-response model helping boards and C-Suites resolve complex issues quickly without losing trust or control.
• Intelligence & Policy Translation: We provide "Reading the Tea Leaves" analysis: translating complex policy signals into actionable business intelligence. We ensure your initiatives are grounded in sound strategy and the "internal radar" of your leadership is tuned to shifting global and national dynamics.

Place-Based Implementation:

• Deployment & Site Selection Strategy: We navigate the regulatory, political, and physical dynamics of project build-outs. From site selection and permitting to regional industrial scale-up, we ensure projects are structured to move through approval and implementation with maximum efficiency.
• Stakeholder Mapping & Risk Mitigation: We identify the stakeholders who matter, assess sources of friction or opposition, and design engagement strategies that protect credibility and momentum. We solve the "Missing Link" by clearing the institutional bottlenecks that technology and capital alone cannot solve.
• The "Red Carpet" Regional Tour: A signature service for global firms and capital providers seeking deep-dive immersion into critical industrial power centers. We facilitate the high-level introductions and site-specific intelligence required for real-world deployment at speed and scale.

High-Impact Convenings:

• Private and Public Convenings: We design and lead mission-critical engagements, including our signature Game Changer Luncheons, where cross-sector intelligence is traded and high-stakes deployment decisions are de-risked among global capital drivers and public sector leaders.
• Third-Party Validation & Trust Equity: We leverage the firm’s established "Trust Equity" to uplift client profiles through strategic positioning and narrative alignment, helping to build the social license and movement-building stories required for long-term project success.
• Movement-Building & Strategic Advisory: We draft and execute the narratives and sign-on coalitions that align institutional and community interests, ensuring that a project’s strategic narrative matches the physical reality of its impact.

Resilience Engineering:

• Capital Strategy & Alignment: We help position projects for investment and reduce perceived risk so that financing can move in parallel with development. We position clients to capture the "Resilience Dividend" through better-engineered industrial and economic outcomes.
• External Brain (Advisory Board) Management: We stand up and manage bespoke Advisory Boards—expertly balancing demographics and subject matter expertise—to ensure leadership teams maintain an elite global perspective on emerging physical, security, and environmental risks.
• Security & Industrial Integration: We align energy security solutions with global stability prerequisites. Our framework ensures that new technologies are engineered to endure within an "environment-as-infrastructure" context, supporting long-term industrial scaling and regional retention.