Soft Launch: General Interest Event

Our (kinda) Kickoff Event

In April, we sent out a flyer to our mailing list, inviting community members to our event, Building Power for the People: The What, Why, and How of Community-Owned Solar.

Hosted at The Village, and created in conjunction with Worcester Roots, we invited a special guest, Gregory King from the Boston Community Solar Cooperative to talk about his organization’s experiences as they prepared to build community-owned solar in Boston. We were looking forward to an exciting event, when our community became a target of ICE enforcement actions, making national news when community members gathered to protect an immigrant mother and her children. The incident heightened fears among community members about attending public gatherings, and forcing us to scale back our intended activities for the evening.

Despite the complications, our evening was quite lively and informative. We were blessed by the services of Micah Strauss, who volunteered to facilitate and MC the evening so that members of RENEW could take part in the workshop events, and thoroughly enjoyed the soft launch of our new zine, presented as a recorded dramatic reading by Jeuji and her roommates. Fantastic Pizza and Cafe provided pizza, sandwiches, and falafel for free, and Mr. King stayed late to answer questions and engage with attendees.