Soulardarity

Soulardarity is a community organization formed in response to the repossession of over 1000 streetlights from the city of Highland Park, MI. We’re building community power, promoting community-owned clean energy, and creating self-determination in Highland Park through the collective planning and cooperative ownership of 200 solar-powered streetlights. We just installed our second streetlight at a community park in HP. In the next year, we are launching a community cooperative and installing the first 20 streetlights owned by the Co-op. We need your help to raise $25K to pay local organizers, build the cooperative, and leverage full funding for the 20 streetlights in 2015, with the full 200 coming within two years.

Check out this piece about our most recent streetlight installation here:

http://www.modeldmedia.com/features/soulardarity-highland-park-082514.aspx

To reach our goal of launching the co-op and installing 20 more streetlights this year, we need to:

1. Education and Outreach - Talking to Highland Parkers about energy, cooperatives, where streetlights are needed, and the needs in the city that can be addressed through cooperative ownership

2. Building the Co-op and Planning the Lights - Making a business plan and building membership for the Co-op, while having new members identify locations for the next 20 streetlights

3. Installation - In the Summer of 2015, we install the first 20 streetlights owned by a community co-op in Highland Park. This will be our biggest installation yet and our first in the ownership of the cooperative.

4. Scaling up! Our next steps after this year will be creating a community plan for the streetlights, raising the full funds we need, and installing the full 200 by 2017. With your support, we can take our next big step towards that goal.

Highland Park, MI is a small city inside of Detroit. It is the site of the world's first automobile assembly line and urban freeway. Since the withdrawal of automobile manufacturing from the city, the city has experienced a meteoric drop in population, employment, and tax base that has left much of its infrastructure in disrepair. In 2011, over 1000 of Highland Park's streetlights were repossessed by the local utility to forgive $4 million of electrical debt, leaving residential streets in the dark.

In Highland Park and Detroit there are serious issues with water, housing, transit, and energy resulting from decades of depopulation, divestment, and inequity. Through solar streetlights, we are building a model of community ownership to empower citizens to tackle deeper infrastructure issues and create a vision for a clean, thriving, sustainable community.