GRID GLA and LINC Housing Corp.'s Santa Ana residents meet around the grill, stay to gain skills

With the rollout of the multifamily solar program upon completion of recent work in Lancaster, our team's seen volunteer and community interest pick up fast. We're committed, as always, to a solar energy revolution whose benefits include everyone. That's why for the next multifamily partnership planned in the region, we intend to go one step further than the basic benefits of clean energy and ensure that residents of the multifamily housing project can be involved in installing our system! LINC Housing Corporation is working with us to bring City Gardens in Santa Ana, Orange County a combination of energy-centric and people-centric services, work that will challenge us throughout the spring.

We've been putting modules on individual multifamily structures at City Gardens for more than three weeks. What going to change with the passage of the next few weeks is the role historically-underserved residents play in this construction. Thanks to GRID, a dozen people from the City Gardens family housing community with no experience necessary will get training to work on residential solar. The weekly classroom meetings near their homes lay out a pathway for the tenants build up skills, and they can subsequently join us on one the roofs that they see daily to put those skills to work.

On City Gardens' communal lawn, we recently kicked back with warm sandwiches and cool drinks to BBQ with residents and make sure they know about the training opportunity approaching them. Staff, City Gardens families, and LINC reps chowed their way through more than a hundred burgers and struck up plenty of conversations about what good-paying energy jobs could bring to Santa Anans like these. Interested in learning more about the workforce development side of our multiple-month investment in Santa Ana's City Gardens? Contact Alex Turek and continue to follow updates on our page.