The Vicars Community Center resilience hub at Community Church Atlanta will begin serving the surrounding Atlanta residents in 2024 thanks to committed local leadership. This community resilience hub will support the church’s ongoing service to area residents, including ongoing local outreach through its soup kitchen and food pantry.
The resilience hub at the Community Church will be powered by a 34.1 kW DC solar installation connected to 320 kWh of battery storage. This facility is a centralized, trusted organization where community members can access reliable power for their essential devices, continue to receive information as emergency situations develop, store medications sensitive to temperature, and safely gather in the aftermath of an emergency or severe weather event to allow the community to recover safely and effectively. Community Church and the Vicars Community Center provide meals to 300-400 families every week and serve as a meeting place for various local organizations, including the Concerned Black Clergy of Metropolitan Atlanta and Neighborhood Planning Unit S (NPU-S).
As the developer for this community resilience hub, Groundswell worked with leaders from Community Church to meet the greatest needs within the neighborhood while building off the groundwork laid by the Breaking Barriers project. Breaking Barriers was part of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s (NREL) Solar Energy Innovation Network. Focused on developing a resilience hub design serving the Atlanta University Complex, the project was led by Groundswell working alongside local partners including Partnership for Southern Equity, Spelman College, Morehouse College, Morehouse College of Medicine, Clark Atlanta University, and Georgia Power with additional technical support from Georgia Tech.
Thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the Vicars project leverages Elective Pay to deliver community ownership. The project also applied for and received a low-income bonus tax credit allocation associated with Section 48e of the IRA. This community resilience hub also received funding support from the GM and a donation from Stryten Energy.
This community resilience hub is being funded with support from the GM. InterUrban Solar — a Black-owned business — is leading engineering, procurement, and construction for this project alongside SunCatch Energy — a fourth-generation, Black-owned business with a track record of successful solar installations. Stryten Energy, a Georgia-based company, is procuring and installing the battery, allowing the resilience hub to provide three days of backup power for critical uses during power outages. The Wells Fargo Foundation is providing ongoing support to advance community ownership of resilience hubs like the one at Community Church Atlanta.
