Serenity Soular installs solar panels in areas hardest hit by climate change

(Ecology) Justice for All

North Philly's Serenity Soular is training workers and installing solar panels in communities hardest hit past climate alter

Mar. xviii, 2020

In 2013, when Swarthmore environmental studies professor Giovanna Di Chiro first took students to Serenity Firm, a non-turn a profit community eye on 12th and Lehigh streets, the intention was pretty elementary: to assistance create a garden and customs cafe where neighbors could gather.

They toured the house and the surrounding neighborhood with .O, Placidity House's customs caregiver—who does non utilise her legal proper name—and surveyed the backyard, imaging what kind of vegetables could exist grown there. They crawled onto the garage roof to meet if it could be converted to a green roof, or a kind of roof superlative garden.

Somewhen, they did build the garden. But the roof became something fifty-fifty better: The first of Quiet's forays into bringing community solar power and jobs to North Philly.

With the aid of Di Chiro, her Swarthmore students, and the Swarthmore applied science faculty, Repose residents installed solar panels on the roof of the centre'south garage, which are now helping to generate electricity for a security low-cal and cord lights in the garden's gathering space. Throughout the process, Di Chiro and her students worked with .O to organize community workshops on the science and mechanics of solar free energy and solar panels.

That led Di Chiro and .O to launch Tranquility Soular, a non-profit, worker-owned solar panel installation visitor that employs North Philadelphia residents and that makes the transition to clean energy affordable for communities of color who are ofttimes the ones most affected by global climatic change.

So far, Serenity Soular has educated two classes of apprentices, and begun a partnership with YouthBuild Philly, a schoolhouse and training program for eighteen to 21-year-old high school dropouts. They have completed three solar installation projects, including the 1 at Serenity House. Currently, they are working on solarizing the Village of Arts and Humanities.

"A truly sustainable society is one in which all peoples are treated with dignity and accept access to a healthy surround and a secure livelihood," Di Chiro says.

"Community leaders imagined this suggestion as a scalable idea in support of climate justice and a just transition away from fossil fuels and into secure, career path jobs in the greenish economy," Di Chiro says. "We hoped that this entry point into the solar field could generate new opportunities to enter the workforce in the burgeoning solar economy."

All of this speaks to a pair of intertwined issues facing many in North Philadelphia: The effects of climate change and the need for more and ameliorate jobs.

"A truly sustainable guild is one in which all peoples are treated with dignity and have access to a healthy environment and a secure livelihood," Di Chiro says. "In our early conversations, .O said that the ecology justice framework I described resonated with her vision for Serenity House, and nosotros discussed how we could build a productive partnership joining together the goals of community healing, regeneration, and 'but' sustainability."

A study published in the January 2022 effect of the periodical Climate establish that Philadelphia neighborhoods that had once been redlined had average daily temperatures that were nearly 10 degrees higher than non-redlined neighborhoods. This has ripple furnishings ranging from college energy bills to absurd houses, to an increase in wellness bug and even early mortality.

Serenity House, once a parsonage of Cookman United Methodist Church, serves every bit a community centre that promotes leadership development, spiritual growth, and community organizing. They offering chore awarding assistance, cooking classes, community activities, Bible studies and help connect residents with other community services. At Tranquillity House, .O hosts community gatherings and group sessions on anger direction, domestic violence bug, healthy eating, and more.

The partnership with Swarthmore stemmed from conversations that .O and Di Chiro began having in 2012, when Di Chiro joined the college faculty. Di Chiro, who has worked with activists and community members to pursue environmental justice for over three decades, knew that she wanted to connect with local activists in gild to pursue equitable sustainability throughout the region.

"The field of ecology justice grew from grassroots social movements, from communities of color around the world resisting and confronting the injustices of environmental racism and the asymmetric impacts on their lives of the so-called 'progress' of our industrialized societies," Di Chiro says.

Their work manifested in an independent study form at Swarthmore, which led to the initial backyard garden and, a year later, the solar panel installation.

This year, Quiet Soular plans to secure their 501(c)3 not-profit condition and to finish structuring the organisation as a cooperative. They merely completed a successful crowdfunding entrada which raised just over $11,000, to back up their organizational building efforts. (Their goal was $10,000.)

The apprenticeship programme runs parallel with the solar panel installations, the grouping works with local leaders to recruit young people to secure funding for them to attend courses and to shadow the installers. In 2019, one of Quiet's former apprentices and current lead solar installer, Ky Sanders, led the group's outset contained installation at The People's Garden, a community garden managed by the members of Serenity Business firm, funded by Energy Sprout, a grant contest through Penn State.

"The field of environmental justice grew from grassroots social movements, from communities of colour around the world resisting and confronting the injustices of environmental racism and the disproportionate impacts on their lives of the and then-chosen 'progress' of our industrialized societies," Di Chiro says.

Later that year, the showtime YouthBuild Philly projection solarized Philadelphia Urban Creators; the school and Serenity will next take on installation projects at W Philly's Sankofa House; the North Philly Peace Park. Also in the planning stages are a community garden solar installation projection with the Penn State NECA pupil chapter, and a serial of residential projects with the Westward Philly Solar Co-op and YouthBuild Philly.

The Village of Arts and Humanities projection is funded through RE-volv, a San Francisco-based organization whose mission is to empower people and communities to invest collectively in renewable energy. Several of Tranquility Soular'southward student leaders became Solar Ambassadors through RE-volv, which helps run funding campaigns to assistance non-profits transition to solar free energy. So far, Repose Soular has funded their efforts through crowdfunding, grant writing, donations, fees for speaking and leading tours, and solar contracts installation contracts.

Serenity Soular has as well participated in the city'south Coolest Cake Contest, which allows low-income homeowners to apply to go the "coolest block" and, if successful, receive weatherization retrofits for the unabridged cake. In 2015, the 1200 cake of Seltzer Street won the competition with Serenity's help, and the organization then helped collect the required information from homeowners to approve the retrofits to their homes.

"Because the members of Serenity Soular had built trust with the local community, local residents were willing to share this personal information, and we enabled 20 low-income homeowners on Seltzer Street to receive full energy efficiency retrofits," Di Chiro says.

All of Serenity Soular's goals grow from their want to run their non-profit like a triple bottom business, prioritizing social and ecology justice concerns as with the income that comes in to support their piece of work. Repose Soular is a worker-endemic cooperative and member of the Philadelphia Expanse Cooperative Alliance (PACA); Frank Oritz, their sometime business evolution advisor, used to sit on PACA's board. It's a mission that's embedded in the company'due south proper name: It spells "solar" every bit "soular" in order to emphasize that their initiative focuses on "the people and not just the panels," Di Chiro says.

"Historically, the costs of conventional profit and growth oriented businesses have been externalized onto the bodies, health, and lives of those most marginalized: poor people and people of color," she says. "Our goal is to develop a simply and sustainable economical model that puts people and the community at the center, that puts people'south health at the center, that puts clean air, water, and land at the center, equally well as creating the chapters to generate a decent livelihood and economic security for the community."

Photo courtesy Serenity Soular / Facebook

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Source: https://thephiladelphiacitizen.org/serenity-soular-solar-panels/

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