Experience That Lives in the Details

Ellen Barlas is a principal and strategic advisor who has spent her career at the intersection of energy, workforce development, and public program design. She is based in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, and works with national partners across the utility, nonprofit, and state government sectors.

Her entry into the clean energy workforce field came through hands-on program administration, where she developed a precise understanding of what it takes to move people from interest in a career into sustained employment. That foundation shaped everything that followed.

At the Midwest Renewable Energy Association, she served as Solar Workforce Manager and later as Associate Director, building employer partnerships, managing program design, and helping the organization scale its training and market development work. Her time there established deep relationships across the Midwest clean energy community and gave her a practitioner-level view of how workforce supply and employer demand connect, or fail to.

She joined Slipstream as Managing Director of Education and Training in 2024, where she oversaw workforce development programming, partnerships, and training delivery aligned to a national mission of accelerating clean energy adoption. In January 2026, she moved into the role of Principal Director of Workforce Development, taking on strategy, stakeholder alignment, and market-facing initiatives that require both policy fluency and operational experience.

She approaches workforce development as an economic development discipline. Talent pipelines matter when they are connected to real labor demand. Programs succeed when the incentives are right, the partners are aligned, and the structure is designed to outlast the initial funding cycle.

Sarah Dooling is a principal and strategic advisor with a career built at the intersection of climate policy, organizational development, and cross-sector coalition work. She holds a PhD in Urban Design and Planning from the University of Washington, where she was a National Science Foundation IGERT Urban Ecology Fellow. She is based in Duluth, Minnesota.

Her doctoral training in urban systems shapes how she approaches problems that others treat as purely operational. Who is structurally excluded from a program. Whether an incentive design holds under real-world conditions. Whether a coalition is built on shared interest or just shared language. Those questions matter at every stage of policy development and program design, and she carries them into every engagement.

As Executive Director of the Massachusetts Climate Action Network, she led a statewide organization of 65 chapters through a period of significant policy opportunity and political complexity. The work required holding together municipal advocates, state regulators, utility stakeholders, and federal program partners while advancing concrete policy goals around building decarbonization, energy justice, and grid governance. That experience gave her a practitioner's understanding of how coalitions actually function under pressure.

At Slipstream, she has built and led the advancement function — the business development, proposal, and partnership infrastructure that connects the organization's mission to the utility clients, state agencies, and foundations that fund and deploy it. The work requires fluency in how funders think, how utilities make program decisions, and how to position a technically sophisticated organization in a competitive landscape.

Her consulting practice focuses on clients who need strategic clarity at the organizational level: how to structure partnerships, how to approach a new market, how to build the internal capacity that makes external commitments credible.