Solar Moonshot Program Grantee

"As we learned more about the educational impact of the COVID-19 crisis on our DREAMers, it became clear that sustaining connection and providing enrichment opportunities over the summer would be critical. Youth are experiencing a significant gap in education and connection to caring adults. This gap, as is often the case, disproportionally affects the most vulnerable in our communities. Rather than suspend operations, we hired on our largest team of summer counselors to date, to work closely, in a virtual setting, with each of our DREAMers, in order to ensure that they would be engaged in learning and connecting over the summer months. While this usually includes overnight camping at Camp DREAM with an outdoors/environmental program focus, we instead offered a virtual camp. The virtual camp was delivered by a team of camp counselors living at Camp DREAM, and included a variety of environmental and adventure activities (this usually involved an initial online gathering of campers and counselors with some group activities, and then would transition to a series of activities for the youth to do on their own, outside). The solar installation is going to support our values (as an environmental-focused adventure base, we try to model the values we teach through our programming) as well as help us financially (by covering the costs of heating, lighting and other electric needs, we’ll be saving a significant amount annually that we can, instead, invest directly in our youth and programming). This [grant] is going to have a huge impact on our nonprofit. We’re deeply grateful for the generosity (and the ease with which this support came through)."