Nonprofit Announces $750K Grant to Build ‘Solar Resilience Hub’ in New Orleans

245489715 201054558800417 9168497174720725755 NNEW ORLEANS – Direct Relief, a California-based humanitarian aid organization, announced it is awarding up to $750,000 to Together New Orleans’ Community Lighthouse project to fund construction of a solar- and battery-powered resilience hub at CrescentCare, 1631 Elysian Fields Avenue. 

The grant is part of Direct Relief’s new Power of Health Initiative, which seeks to ensure that vulnerable nonprofit community health centers and charitable clinics in the U.S. stay powered and remain operational through increasingly common power outages resulting from natural disasters and electrical grid failures. The nonprofit said the Community Lighthouse at CrescentCare will be the largest solar plus battery system it has funded outside of Puerto Rico.

“As a community health center, CrescentCare has worked through countless weather events, including Hurricanes Katrina and Ida. We intimately know the effects of storms on our healthcare systems, our staff, our clients, and our neighbors,” said CrescentCare CEO Noel Twilbeck in a press release. “The support from Direct Relief shows a profound commitment to the health and wellbeing of our city. We are honored to be the first commercial space included in the Community Lighthouse Project and we look forward to further expanding the resilience of our services for our city.”

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The Community Lighthouse Project is a new initiative of Together New Orleans that envisions the creation of a community-wide network of 85-100 resilience hubs across south Louisiana, each powered by commercial-scale solar systems with back-up battery capacity, that will be able to assess need and provide assistance to surrounding neighborhoods during power outages. 

When power outages occur, Community Lighthouses hopes to be able to conduct needs assessments and provide for those needs by offering charging stations/small battery distribution, food preparation and distribution, cooling/heating stations, oxygen exchange/light medical equipment, and, in the case of CrescentCare, basic healthcare services.

Factoring in a commitment of $1 million from the Greater New Orleans Foundation, Together New Orleans said it is on its way to raising the funds for the Community Lighthouse pilot phase of 10 locations.

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