2022 Impact Report

We were excited to sponsor a Climate Carnival for the residents of Colombia County, N.Y., helping to turn climate action into a fun community celebration. Our community-based efforts to bring clean, affordable energy to rural New York residents won us the Department of Energy’s 2022 Inclusive Solar Outreach Award.

“Municipal leaders and trusted community leaders introduced us to and helped organize informal gatherings where we were able to educate the residents about community solar. These meetings allowed us to break down barriers and mistrust of community solar, due in part to predatory business practices of retail energy suppliers over the past 15 years. We teamed up with the communities in Chatham, Austerlitz, Kinderhook, and Columbia County in the rural, agricultural belt of upstate New York to ensure that clean, affordable energy is accessible to all, especially lower-income households in rural parts of the state,” said Cara Humphrey, VP of Strategic Sales for Neighborhood Sun, who helped carry out the award-winning campaign.

We fully subscribed the Oaks Landfill Community Solar Farm this year, guaranteeing access to 25% savings on electricity costs for low- and moderate-income (LMI) residents, including 829 affordable homes owned by the Housing Opportunities Commission of Montgomery County.

Neighborhood Sun was founded in Montgomery County, Maryland so the opportunity to subscribe local LMI residents to a project within our very own community serves as proof that clean energy generation can be both local and community-oriented.

Built on 16 acres of repurposed landfill, the Oaks Landfill Community Solar Farm is dedicated 100% to serving local LMI residents, making it the largest project of its kind in the entire nation.

We are proud to say we go way back with the Chesapeake Climate Action Network (CCAN), and we are truly grateful for the work they do to help put us on a path to climate stability. In addition to sponsoring their anniversary event this year, we encourage our team members to fundraise for their organization’s Polar Plunge every year by jumping in the freezing water (Don’t worry, they love it!).

We all have a lot to gain from fellow grassroots environmentalist organizations uplifting each other. As our C.E.O. Gary Skulnik said, “There is no single piece of clean energy or climate legislation that has passed in Maryland, DC or Virginia since the year 2003 that CCAN hasn’t been the leader on. Without them, we’d be light-years behind where we are now.” Thank you CCAN!”

During Earth Month, we partnered with Carbon Neutral Club to kick off our green employee benefits package so we could offer a variety of sustainability-related benefits to our team members that embody the values we all share at Neighborhood Sun.

Ultimately, we just want our team to know that while they are working hard every day to help communities achieve independence from fossil fuels, we’ve got their emissions covered, both inside and outside the office. As a result, our team removed 287.11 tonnes of Carbon emissions in 2022, equivalent to more than 317,000 pounds of coal NOT burned. Through Carbon Neutral Club, our team members also get access to discounts on vetted partner brands in their sustainable marketplace and educational resources related to reducing carbon emissions through daily activities.

In 2022, our community solar subscribers made it possible to add 117,249,144 kWh of renewable energy to the electric grid. By powering the grid with locally-generated solar energy instead of fossil fuels, we prevented 83,000+ Metric Tons of CO2-equivalent from polluting our air and heating up our atmosphere. That’s the same as preventing the emissions that would result from burning 93,076,253 pounds of coal.

Our subscribers also helped us advocate for legislation that would make it easier to support equitable access to clean energy throughout Maryland, New York, California, New Jersey, and New Mexico.

By holding a community fundraising round through WeFunder, we made our investment process more inclusive and democratic, allowing current subscribers, team members, and truly ANYONE who wants to help accelerate the clean energy transition to invest in an equitable renewable energy future for as little as $250.

We closed out the WeFunder round with nearly $2 Million in community investments from almost 2,000 community members of all kinds, including current subscribers, team members, and leaders in the corporate impact space like Seth Goldman, Co-founder of Honest Tea & Executive Chairman of Beyond Meat.

As we grew quickly in 2022, we wanted to make sure we were keeping up with the evolving needs of our team, so we made a couple changes to our policies.

1. We formalized a policy for mandatory phone interviews as a preliminary step to account for any unconscious bias and refined our first-ever team diversity survey.
2. Due to popular demand, we altered our PTO policy to now include 3 sick days available per quarter that remain separate from vacation days.
3. We added new benefits to our employee packages, such as paid carbon offsets through Carbon Neutral Club and full coverage of a gym membership for each team member.

Fortunately, volunteering is embedded in our community solar business model, but our team really takes it to another level, both on and off the clock. As such, we launched a formal Team Volunteering Club at the beginning of 2022 to provide a sense of community and support for those self-driven volunteering efforts. In 2022, our team logged over 500 volunteering hours in the communities we live in and serve. We also offer 24 hours of paid volunteering time each year to be used as people wish.

As a team-driven effort to prepare for the holiday season, many of us traveled to 4MyCity in Baltimore (where this photo was taken on December 15) to help pack rescued food supplies and toys that the organization would deliver to families facing food insecurity in Baltimore City.