GRID's "How I Got Here" Series: Orlanda Cunningham

This is the first in a series of regular profiles introducing the GRID Alternatives Greater Los Angeles staff. In their own way, each member of our team brings a passion for renewable energy to the day-to-day work of Los Angeles' most socially-minded solar company. Here's how one of them got to that point: Orlanda Cunningham, Outreach Coordinator.


Unlike a usual grandmother of three, in 2014 Orlanda Cunningham found herself standing on top of a house in Los Angeles. "The hardest part was getting up on the roof, getting up that ladder," she remembers with the grin of someone who looks to the bright side of everything. "Once I get up there it becomes easy." Working under the direction of a Solar Installation Supervisor named Jose, she recalls being just as comfortable on that rooftop as she'd felt in other unusual circumstances: organizing recording libraries for music requests in the Navy, working as an entry-level gardener for the San Diego city government, and raising all her children over the years.

Orlanda had been invited to climb that ladder by GRID Alternatives Greater Los Angeles, the only organization she'd heard of that encouraged women to install solar with other women. Even better, GRID Alternatives prioritized learning opportunities for women like her. She had gone through a series of classes sponsored by Homeboy Industries: Photovoltaics 1, 2, and 3. Her learning was complete only once she'd tried putting the knowledge into practice herself, however, and that made the handful of installs she signed up for a natural next step—"putting the racking down one day, and then the panels down the next."

The hardest job Orlanda had ever had, where she'd only lasted a day, had been working as a welder in a major Southern California shipbuilding company. The company had told her to make some adjustments by taking her tools down into a narrow hole that was just too tight for her comfort, and there wasn't much opportunity to discuss those problems. Yet doing a residential installation with GRID Alternatives, in the open air, was different. A former small business owner with an undefeatable attitude, Orlanda had long described herself as someone who "saw the sun behind the clouds!" And now she could do it literally, via the power of solar.

Hands-on experience led Orlanda to join SolarCity in 2016, where her knack for doing outreach started to show. But with a sales environment outside the mission-driven world, she remembers wanting more out of her interactions. ("For me, just finishing school, I had a lot of information to share to educate the customer!") She was calling clients in 2017 when she got a call from a number she wasn't expecting: the familiar voice of GRID Alternatives' Construction Manager, Norman Graham. Orlanda heard him say that GRID Alternatives needed someone like her on the Outreach staff, and she decided that nothing could be a more genuine switch than coming to this team.

"GRID [as a next step] was a perfect because I was able to offer people something they might not be able to afford, and suddenly show them that they could afford it," Orlanda says. At her Outreach Coordinator job, the time families would have spent checking their credit with a for-profit solar company was instead devoted to teaching homeowners to lift themselves up. She's helped so many individuals learn to manage their own energy-saving solar systems in communities around L.A. that she's started to think of herself as, in her own words, a renaissance woman. And when her skills as a people person are put to the test, the challenge she enjoys most is the satisfaction of taking an unsure "no" and turning it into a satisfied "yes."

Orlanda loves working towards a positive future with her Outreach family, reintegrating the skills she developed decades ago as a real estate agent and an Accountant 1 for city government and learning how to talk to households about making bills more affordable. The impact on others is something like what she experiences as a cook for her closest friends: warm laughter, interest in seeing more, and a big round of thanks. She's taken the optimistic outlook she had on that first installation morning and made it her driving force, taking what transformative, accessible solar offers into the places where it will provide the most value. And no matter where the next GRID day takes her, Orlanda plans to keep smiling to leave a mark on the lives of others. To her, it works a little bit like a quote from Maya Angelou, one that she's grown very familiar with: people are never going to forget how you made them feel.