Youth

This year our SolarCorps Fellows honored Cesar Chavez's legacy as an educator, environmentalist, and civil rights leader through a service day on March 31st.

From March 2nd to the 7th, seven amazing students from the University of Vermont brought with them such a strong wave of enthusiasm, curiosity, and optimism that will not soon be forgotten at the Central Coast office.

On January 7th, 2014, students from University of Nebraska-Lincoln escaped the sub-zero temperatures of the recent Polar Vortex to enjoy two days of mild Goshen, California temperatures installing solar with GRID. The 26 students were part of the UNL Alternative Service Break Program, which aims to expose students to issues within different communities and immersing them in hands on experience to facilitate solutions. The group marveled at the diversity they saw in California, but were a diverse group themselves; from undergraduates to recent grads, from international students to a Central Valley native that came home to serve.

Our future is determined in large part by the choices we make every day both large and small. If all we’ve done as a society has been to dirty our air with factories and power plants, we can choose cleaner methods of energy production. If we’ve hit a rough patch in our personal lives, we can choose to fight despair with education and mental discipline. A recent event in the Central Coast brought two groups together that made those better choices which point a way towards a brighter future for us all.

Every day at GRID Alternatives we work to provide hands-on training for those interested in working in the solar energy field. The commitment to teaching is not only for our volunteers, but also for our SolarCorps Fellows, individuals who spend a year in service with GRID Alternatives in exchange for learning opportunities that will help jump-start their careers.

This November in Woodland, more than a dozen high school and college students worked together to install solar for a local elderly woman. This is the first of a number of installs in Yolo County that will engage youth in energy service learning projects in their community, thanks to the support of a number of local governments, Yolo County Office of Education and Woodland Community College.

“We wanted to give college students who are passionate about renewable energy the chance to turn that passion into action doing projects that have a tangible impact on families’ lives”

GRID Alternatives is bringing energy education into the classroom, and students into the field, across the northstate.