VISION
SolarNation’s vision is to engage every person and every community to combat catastrophic climate change at the local level.
MISSION
SolarNation’s mission is to transform climate consciousness by supporting and accelerating the efforts of local communities to eliminate their carbon footprints.
Method
SolarNation is a nonprofit formed on the premise that communities will embrace the aspirational goal of addressing climate change when offered meaningful and plausible ways to do so collectively. SolarNation targets the denial, despair and sense of powerlessness that many feel at the prospect of catastrophic climate change by guiding and supporting community-driven efforts to organize and finance community solar and other net-zero energy activities.
Using Mindfulness Dialogue, Solar Nation supports the critical steps needed to initiate, sustain, and scale the formation of communities that can support members to work across differences, to align themselves around their common aspiration related to combat climate change, and to connect and contribute to a movement much bigger than themselves.
SolarNation’s approach minimizes technical barriers while maximizing participants’ emotional connection to the work. This changes people’s relationship to climate change, from isolated victims to collective victors. The resultant transformation of climate-change consciousness puts communities on hopeful pathways to take further action to grow the movement and ensure a healthy future for the planet.
SolarNation’s work with communities occurs in three phases:
- Phase 1 – Initial Engagement: SolarNation activates a Critical Who in community building sessions using Mindfulness-Dialogues. This group in turn drives a 12-month community organizing campaign to raise regional awareness, engage key stakeholders, organize and develop a community-scale solar project.
- Phase 2 – Deepening Engagement: Local leaders design and develop additional community-level campaigns to further reduce the region’s carbon footprint with the aspiration of achieving Net-Zero.
- Phase 3 – Growing the Movemenent: Expanded leadership leverages experience and demonstrated impacts to educate, guide and inspire neighboring communities to replicate the process, thereby growing the movement exponentially.
Unique Offering
Engaged Community: Using Mindfulness-Dialogues, SolarNation mobilizes local multidisciplinary executive teams of key stakeholders to oversee community solar project development and to direct volunteer community organizing campaigns.
Streamlined, Seamless, Online Platform: SolarNation serves as the organizing hub for a growing movement.
Support and Expertise: Staff and technical consultants support projects from predevelopment to execution.
Low and Middle Income (LMI) Access: SolarNation opens the door for LMI participation with discount pricing, publicinterest funding, loan loss reserves and credit enhancements, short-term subscription agreements and non-traditional billing and payment methods.
Dialogue Training: SolarNation trains teams in Mindfulness-Dialogue facilitation which builds relationships and helps people move beyond climate change denial to become deeply committed to the cause and to each other.