Rising Sun Energy Center

Background

Full Circle Fund's Environment/Energy Circle worked with the Ella Baker Center to start a green jobs corps and write a green jobs toolkit, with GRID Alternatives to help scale programs that install solar panels onto low-income family homes, and with Green Cities to create an online repository of best environmental practices to quickly drive forward excellent green policy. This work and the work of countless others in the field finally resulted in increased national attention, political will, and funding for weatherization and green jobs.

With clean technology finally embraced as a way to solve environmental problems, seen as a viable business venture, and a way to create workforce opportunities, there existed an increased need for proven job training models and individuals to perform in these new capacities. As a result of the economic downturn in 2009, there was also an greater need for employment in low-income communities.

Organization Mission

Rising Sun Energy Center's mission is to create a society that uses energy and water responsibly and equitably. To achieve this, Rising Sun is:

• Providing workforce development training and employment that creates green career pathways for youth and for adults with barriers to employment
• Offering low-to-no cost residential retrofits and services to lower energy and water usage
• Educating our communities about sustainable behaviors and technologies

Rising Sun has a tried and tested workforce development model that was refined over the course of ten years. Once the the demand for their best practices and materials began to increase, they realized they needed help to roll out a successful national expansion.

Full Circle Fund Role

Rising Sun identified needs in the areas of Business Strategy and Development, Market Research, Finance, Marketing and Design. With help from Full Circle Fund in these areas, they felt confident that their proven, innovative programs would help solve the climate crisis, put people back to work, AND reduce energy bills, which is a triple win!

The Full Circle Fund/Rising Sun Energy Center partnership was based on helping Rising Sun build its internal capabilities and develop the organization to handle their ramp-up in activity and responsibilities. To this end, Full Circle Fund and Rising Sun identified a number of specific impact areas that were critical for Rising Sun to be successful in making the transition from small start-up to a nationally known thought leader. These included:

• Creating a Five Year Strategic Marketing Plan & Materials for Expansion
• Identifying key market sectors and partners for target expansion
• Identifying and soliciting a pro-bono PR Firm
• Identifying and soliciting potential funding sources for expansion
• With the grant money, Rising Sun could produce marketing materials and build out a web based data management system to support affiliates use of material and measure their impacts

NAME: Rising Sun Energy Center
LOCATION: Berkeley
WEB: risingsunenergy.org
GRANT TERMS: 2010-2011
TEAM LEADS: Alli Chagi-Starr