This year, we'll be dedicating our resources to provide additional training and workforce development services to individuals who have formerly been incarcerated. GRID Alternatives supports equity and second chances for all. We see the solar industry as a vehicle to open up opportunity for everyone, and in that spirit, we'll be highlighting success stories from returning citizens. Please support our efforts!
My name's Darean Nguyen, of El Monte, in the San Gabriel Valley near Los Angeles. I was locked up for quite a few years, right here in L.A. County. I had all the time I wanted to think while I was incarcerated, and even after six years I didn't have a lot of good ideas about what to do.
What happened to me towards the end of time in the County was something I tell people about all the time. Sitting in my cell, I started to pray for a sign from above. I was literally saying, "Lord, give me a sign!" when the prison librarian walked by. That guy threw a book into my cell, which I picked up and saw was a manual about solar. I decided I'd check it out.
By that point I wanted to change, and I remember telling myself that this was something I was going to look into when I'd served all my time. I read through that solar manual, and I was sure I wanted to understand this. I started thinking about homeowners for the first time: I knew how much they spent on electricity every month, and with some of them handling mortgages on the side, it could be a big stretch to pay utility bills. More than a year down the road, I finally had a chance to do something about that.
Back outside of prison, I bumped into a friend and told him, "I'm trying to save up some money to go to school, but it's expensive."
He said, "I know there's a program through Homeboy Industries that'll pay for your education. They'll pay for your solar program, and that's something you can do for yourself—something to get reinstated back into the world."
I remembered the solar book from the time I spent locked up, and decided to apply for an my appointment. That was Tuesday. I set my date on Wednesday, got in there Thursday, and saw everything Homeboy had to offer around getting you into the solar industry. Less than a week after I saw David [Andrade], who made a little speech about starting our training, I was Homeboy ready with enough classes under my belt to try a roof. And even though THAT class had thirty guys in it and they told me the day was full, I rode a bus in from El Monte anyway. Maybe I'd get to train with David, I thought, and maybe I wouldn't. It turned out that I got the chance.
My training took me to the East Los Angeles Skills Center, where I'd go by bus three days a week, all the while telling my girlfriend, "This is what I want to do." I've always been mechanically inclined, and I do think that I'm pretty smart. Every time that I was working on solar, at least, I thought: This is it, the path for me. I was picked for ELASC class president, where they gave me a nickname ("Tools"), and by September my girlfriend had bought me real tools, too— $500 worth.
I remember that there were a couple of guys in ELASC classes that weren't all there with the math. They were getting left behind on the work and started struggling. But this is something I could do, and I knew it. I made a promise to myself and to Homeboy Industries that I'd pay this system back somehow, even though they didn't want a thing from me, and I got those students together and asked, "Do you want to sit down twice a week and have a study session?" as a way of passing something on. That's exactly what we did, and when the final came they passed the same courses I did. I saw what I had accomplished for the four of us, and it was a good intro to starting as a volunteer at GRID Alternatives after I got all my PV completions.
My classmates told me about a warehouse internship with GRID, which is how I got in at first. David came right down that first day [David Andrade moved from Homeboy Industries to GRID Alternatives' training program late last year --Ed.], and he goes, "Why don't you use your this first day to go out in the truck with a Solar Installation Supervisor?" Ever since, I've made it to GRID practically five times a week, often at 6:15 in the morning. My girlfriend's kids are six-, eight-, and ten-year-olds at San Gabriel Elementary, which means my girlfriend has to get them to school by 8:20 instead of running a carpool that would get me to GRID, and I don't want to put her through too much anyway. So I've started budgeting $5 a day for the Silver Line from El Monte on each morning I want to spend my time helping some people get solar on their homes.
Learning a whole lot from the supervising SISes, I learned about the Installation Basics Training program, which David pointed me towards as a good next step. He told me, "This is what you'll need before we want you to lead groups up on a roof." And not too long after that, Norman started telling me things like, "I think it's time to see what you're made of." From there, Norm took a chance on letting me team up with him on an installation, do my work alongside him, and get everybody off the house safely by the end of the day. That first morning, Norm left me on the roof and stayed downstairs, but whenever I looked down at him he'd be showing me a thumbs-up, and that kind of approval stayed in my mind.
By now I've learned tie-ins, which one of the SISes told me was going to happen once I knew my way around all our equipment. Tie-ins are when you review all the connections from roof to box, looking at the disconnect, the invertor, the main service panel. Every session that I'm out with GRID, I can now teach somebody how to bend conduit for those tie-ins. I can teach trainees the math they need for that, which is a lot like what happened at ELASC. And it's work I feel excited to do every morning.
GRID's gotten me this far, and that's why I catch my bus down to that office on most mornings to this day. As a Team Leader, I mean it when I tell my volunteers not to give up, especially the ones who are wondering about the job opportunities out there. I let them know that they'll get a chance to lead their own teams someday, too, and that GRID will keep driving your learning, with every roof being a different classroom. When I ride my bus back to El Monte, it's actually nicer these days; I see people outside of the window who are polluting the streets, and I see pipes going up in the air, but it's not on my mind. Everyone's always talking about saving the world, but nobody's doing anything about it on the same level as me.