Last week was a week of extraordinary, abundant good! On Monday, Earth Day, Groundswell, Inc. celebrated being selected for a $156 million US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF) Solar For All Award for our SE Rural Power Team. Together, we will deploy community solar and energy storage across eight states — Alabama, Arkansas, North Central Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Central and Southern Virginia — that will cut electricity bills and energy burdens in half for tens of thousands of people with low and moderate household incomes across the region.
I am so grateful for this opportunity to serve alongside our partners in SE Rural Power, which include local municipal and nonprofit rural cooperative utilities across all eight states. I Love cooperative and public power!
I am grateful to have been in Virginia to celebrate the announcement with President Biden alongside friends and fellow Solar for All awardees like Kerry O'Neill, who was also so kind to share her photos (included in this letter). And for me, more than anything else, kindness towards one another was the most powerful theme of the day. The person who demonstrated this most of all was a young mother, wife of a Marine, and Domino’s pizza driver, Mrs. A. Friend.
You see, I took the train to the Quantico Amtrak station, where friends were going to pick me up to carpool to the event. None of us knew the station was on the Marine base, inside the security perimeter, which we only discovered when they couldn’t get in. Without the kindness of A. Friend who gave me a ride to the event, I would not have made it to the celebration. I want to honor and celebrate her here today, and her little seven-year-old son she told me about, who already has such love for nature that he picks up litter when they go to the park together to leave it better than how he found it. She is my hero today, and her son is my example.
I can’t wait to bring that spirit to SE Rural Power Solar for All. Joyful work!
Hallelujah!
