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Blessing upon blessings! This Sunday, Oct. 18, Grace Lutheran Church will bless our new community refrigerator and solar panels, flipping on the switch for these vital ministries.
Grace, as a church, has been committed to responding to the needs of its neighbors following Christ’s call to love and serve your neighbor as you would yourself (Mark 12:30-31).
For many years, Grace has maintained a small Little Free Pantry, which is filled three times a week by members; it is empty every time the volunteers arrive to fill it. When Evanston Community Fridges put out a call for more host sites, this seemed like a no-brainer to the congregation. Feeding others is already in the DNA of the congregation and the need was evident.
Since January of this year, the congregation has been hard at work to make way for the new community refrigerator and larger pantry. We are excited to partner with Evanston Community Fridges on this vital project and ministry and bring this resource to South Evanston.
We also will be blessing and celebrating the installation of our solar panels! After nine years of planning, praying, and making necessary preparations, Grace now has 49 solar panels on its roof.
Back in 2017, Grace formed a Green Team that worked with Faith in Place to have a thorough energy audit. Over the next few years, we upgraded lighting, installed programmable thermostats, created a rain garden, installed window shades to cool a hallway that overheated in the summer months and launched a capital campaign to replace the flat roof on the education wing of the church in the hope that it would eventually support an array of solar panels.
We got our first bid for those panels in 2018, but the new roof wasn’t installed until 2021. In the meantime, we signed up with MC 2 community solar program in May 2021 in order to procure solar energy from their solar farm in Lena, IL. The 20% discount in the cost of energy supply from MC Squared has saved us about $500 per year ever since.
Even more importantly, it has avoided the equivalent of one ton of coal emissions every month for the past 5 ½ years!
To go the next step and add our own source of solar energy supply on our new roof, we needed to find financing for solar panels. Four things eventually made that possible:
1. The 2022 passage of federal legislation that allowed nonprofit organizations to qualify for reimbursement for 30% or more of the capital cost of renewable energy installations such as solar panels.
2. The generous loan from an anonymous family at Grace who fronted the necessary funds to get the project underway, and who will be reimbursed once the federal reimbursement is received.
3. The State of Illinois program for solar renewable energy certificates, once a system is operational.
4. A Faith in Place grant that augmented the more modest financial contributions from other Grace members, including those who danced the night away at a special fundraiser danceathon to benefit the solar panels.
We are grateful to all who supported us in our community fridge and solar projects. We invite the community to help us celebrate at the church, 1430 South Blvd., this Sunday, October 18 at 12:30, as we cut the ribbon and bless these vital new ministries. Those who want to climb a ladder to the roof can even take a close-up look of our solar panels.
Luke Harris-Ferree is the pastor of Grace Lutheran Church in Evanston and Jill Graham is a member there.
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The Evanston RoundTable is the community’s leading source of news about local government, schools, civic and artistic activities, and other important issues facing our city. We seek to foster civic engagement and empower people to address complex issues facing our diverse community, promoting a better understanding and appreciation of people of all races, ethnicities, and income levels.
Evanston Roundtable
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Evanston, Illinois 60201
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