News

Five years ago, Rosana Francescato found herself on a construction site surrounded by unfamiliar tools, gleaming solar panels, and countless GRID-tee-shirt-clad volunteers. She landed there after hearing GRID co-founder and CEO Erica Mackie speak at a green networking event about the upcoming Bay Area Solarthon, GRID's signature fundraiser and solar 'block party.' Eager to get out of the office and experience solar first-hand, Rosana signed herself up.
This Veterans Day, GRID Alternatives announced our national Troops to Solar initiative to connect veterans to solar jobs by providing hands-on training to 1000 U.S. military veterans and active service members across the country. The initiative, supported by a 3-year, $750,000 grant from Wells Fargo, builds on the job training work we have have been doing with veterans at across the country.
In October of 2015 The Spokane Indian Housing Authority took a big step towards its goal by collaborating with GRID Alternatives and the Make it Right Foundation and installing four grid-tied residential photovoltaic (PV) systems in a housing development built for families who are below 60% of the national average median income.
The counties that the Rosebud Sioux reservation encompasses are among the poorest in the nation, with unemployment rates as high as 83 percent, and as much as three quarters of the employed population still living under the poverty line. Winter is always the worst, with frigid temperatures, ice and snow limiting already-scarce work opportunities, and sending electricity bills skyrocketing. This year, though, a beacon of hope for some relief is taking shape in the form of a solar array on the home of tribal member Karen Spotted Tail.
The wide stretches of sparsely populated land in Navajo Nation can make it feel like you’ve stepped back into the past. For residents here, that remoteness comes with a price: many live without electricity. Across the Navajo nation, an estimated 15,000 homes have never been connected to the grid. This week we demonstrated one way to begin addressing this issue with an off-grid solar installation for Vietnam veteran Henry Yazzie.
U.S. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell and Shinnecock Tribal leaders brought attention to how tribal communities are at the front lines of climate change in our latest Tribal Solarthon event. Few communities are closer to the front lines than the Shinnecock, a 10,000-year-old tribe on the eastern end of Long Island. With just about 1000 acres of land remaining in its name, the Nation is losing feet of precious coastline every year to rising sea levels, and saw parts of its ancestral graveyard swept away during Superstorm Sandy.