Contrary to Portland’s reputation as a progressive city, my teammate, Frances Swanson, and I discovered last year through gentrification research that sustainability infrastructure was displacing lower income groups from the urban core of the city.  My school, through being an expensive liberal arts college with a number one sustainability ranking, mirrored Portland as an increasingly isolated, non-diverse island of privilege.  Seeking to disrupt this trend of exclusive environmentalism, we applied for a grant from our school seeking to fund a 22kW solar array feasible for an affordable housing complex downtown, which houses former homeless and addicted people, and direct the savings in electricity costs to future renovations. Frances and I are currently working with several nonprofits to model this project, one of the first conjunctures of solar energy and affordable housing in Portland's history, in order to facilitate and catalyze future collaborations between nonprofits and solar. This poster explores how to make sustainability infrastructure more equitable and how undergraduates can create projects that give them a sense of agency in addressing the environmental and social justice issues they see in the world.

solar_sally_poster.pdf

https://ds.lclark.edu/oregonsolarpolicy/