BOULDER, Colo. — Residents at Mapleton Mobile Home Park in Boulder are turning a laundry room into a solar-powered emergency shelter, thanks to a grant from the Boulder County Climate Equity Fund.
Now in its second year, the fund puts resources directly into the hands of grassroots organizations, letting communities decide what solutions work best where they live.
Isabel Sanchez has spent more than five years training her neighbors in community-led disaster preparedness, with a focus on the most vulnerable residents. Sanchez uses a grant from the city of Boulder to conduct these training courses.
- Watch Denver7's Colin Riley walk through the park, in the video player below.
"You can't go through a disaster alone. You have to have community," Sanchez said.
Sanchez said her work targets those who struggle most to recover after a disaster.
"You have communities like this, or communities like senior housing, people that get impacted that can't turn around and come right back, and those are the people that for the last five years I've been training," Sanchez said.
Using the Climate Equity Fund grant, Sanchez is now upgrading the park's laundry room to serve as a solar-powered shelter during grid failures.
"We're changing the whole design," Sanchez said. "We are using the money to upgrade that to make it completely electrified, then we worked with different groups to calculate how much solar we need to be three days off grid."
The project builds on work already underway at the park. Every one of the park's 136 households now has a small solar panel, a 1,000-watt generator, a fridge for medication and a fan.
Boulder County Commissioner Ashley Stolzmann said the fund addresses a growing gap in resources.
"The federal government has cut so much of the climate funding and so much of the racial equity funding, so this is really a marriage of both things," Stolzmann said.
For resident Dan Teboe, the work happening at the park is about feeling secure.
"Because we live in mobile homes, modular homes, they aren't built to withstand the cold and many environmental conditions that we face here," Teboe said.
Sanchez said the most important part of the program is that solutions come from within the community itself.
"The communities are tired of everyone coming up with a solution for something that's going on, but completely not what the community needs," Sanchez said.
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