resources. Some of the people got up and started talking about where the money would come from: "Does it come out of this pot here, does it take away from our regional organizers?" And that's what it came down to. That's why I ask the ques_tion here. DR: Well, there weren't any resources to talk about. VP: We got ours through because Dusky hung onto it. So we called our first meeting of MORE. That's how it happened. One of the reasons for our involvement in energy was that we couldn't find any other minorities involved. In our training programs we wanted to train people for jobs for the future and the solutions to energy problems was one area where there wasn't training available, so it seemed like a natural. MT: Since we started MORE it's much easier to identify groups ' because they come to us. VP: We could have worked through groups like the NAACP, the Urban League, or any of those, but then what would happen to the - other minorities-the Native American, Puerto Rican and Chicano groups-oth~r ·constituencies? CC: There are large national organizations of other minorities . if you wanted to form a coalition . . . It really came home to me that the solar and renewables movement is trying to become a white middle class issue. MT: This is a coalition, but of individuals. The other kind just doesn't work fast enough. The difficulty is we're working under a time factor. Solar and renewable jobs are not going to be entry level like they are now forever. Big business is moving in. The petroleum industry's bought up 40 percent of the copper companies. Somebody said something apout a plastic collector? Anything to make solar an industry that can be controlled by the conglomerates so we can no longer get into it. When they talk about solar being comJanuary 1980 RAIN mercially feasible they' re always talking about the Solar Ener.gy Industries Association (see MR's review of The Sun Betrayed). They're not talking about low-level technology meeting basic needs. Even the solar activists are not talking about it. By the time it takes us to go through the major organizations, many of whom don't even have policies in this area, by the time it would take us to get them to commit themselves to doing what it is that some of us are already doing-it would be too late. We can't afford to wait any longer. DP: The MORE steering committee may not be from the large national minority organizations but all of them are from the local groups that are doing renewable related projects. VP: We ask that the members be at least involved in some renewable resources. We didn't want to bring together a bunch of ethnic minorities just to talk. CC: Do you use MORE to leverage money? How do you plan to keep employment in the energy field'open for minorities? How.do you promote the issues and provide minorities with access to programs? - MT: MORE is trying to get funded. In the meantime we volunteer a lot of our time. We raise the issues in a lot of different places. The network is constantly expanding. Every time we go through a city we add on a lot of people. The interest i_s there. We've already identified that. CC: What's the program? MT: We're-trying to do a survey to identify all of the ethnic "' minorities who are already interested or involved in solar and otl-ier renewable technologies, basically people for whom we don't have to do a long educational program to convince them _that'solar and renewables work. Through identifying them we want to develop a guide. A very simple guide that says where the res0urces are, where you can go for money, who h~s the information, where are the models you can go to see what's being do·ne, and who else is involved in your area so that you can get in touch. That's the first cont. any job related skills. Many of them could not read and write. So, we were concerned about the education of our children. We • were also concerned about the condition of the housing we lived in. I'd been actively involved in the civil rights movement so I had a long track record of organizing. I'd been involved with the NAACP, with CORE, with the Freedom Sch~ols, been chased by the Ku Klux Klan-everything that you can think of that's related to the civil rights mqvementI've been involved with. So when I found myself in the position of a welfare recipient one thing that was ve.ry clear to me was, when you've got a problem and there are several people around you with the same problem, you organize for action td solve there for six weeks and we found out in fact. that the money was there. We went. through their books and were able to identify the money and we got them to give us our first grant which was $5,000. came clear that solar and insulation programs were to become priorities for funding sources for low income p~ople (studies showed that approximately 49 percent of low income people's income is spent on energy) the West Side CDC put together CETA, VA, HUD, and other program monies to rehabilitate and retrofit 10 that problem. • We started to look around at the agencies that had the responsibility for resolving some of those problems and one of them happened to be the local community action-agency. We found out that they , were sending money back unspent every year. We went down and we asked for a small budget. We submitted a proposal, they said the money wasn't available. So we went down and took over and we sat-in Well, that soon ran out. We continued to harass and raise hell with those agencies that we thought were responsible for meeting our needs until the U.S. Justice Department came out to see what 300 women in San Bernardino were raising hell about. That led to our getting a grant from the regional office in San Francisco. We recognized pr.etty quickly that the name Welfare Rights was'turning a lot of people off, so we came l1P with a name we thought would sound better and that was the West Side Community Development Corporation." Classic roots for an organization that now trains people in six separate programs and has about sixty employees; including, project managers and vocational trainers. Starting with Veterans Administration support their first projects were the·rehabilitation of abandoned houses owned by the VA. They restored a total of 52 and stabilized th_at nei~hborhood. When it behouses to meet Section 8 guidelines. (Section 8 is the HUD subsidized housing program which provides reduced cost housing to low income people.) These units are all supplied with space and water heat from a central solar system designed and constructed by the CDC. After much negotiating the CDC purchased the houses and with Section 8 subsidies is able to provide them to residents for $40.00 a month. At about the same time they implemented city and county Office of Community Development funds :to retrofit 40 units of public housing with solar equipment. By now Wes_t Side CDC manufactures and sells its own solar equpment (at competitive prices) as part of its training program and is exploring the possibilities of getting into the solar collector absorber plate coating business and the manufacturing of concrete blocks. -CC . .. .
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