These Nonprofits Are Creating a Solar Punk Future for South Seattle, Today

by Syris Valentine

When Black Panther debuted, Black folks everywhere lost their collective minds witnessing an African society free from the ravages of colonialism. One of the most striking aspects of Wakanda was how technology and the environment harmonized to support thriving communities. The movie might be a fiction, but community organizations in Burien are collaborating to make something like Wakanda a fact.

This Aug. 12, local nonprofits, businesses, and community members will come together for the second annual Burien Solar Punk Festival at the New Start Community Garden. The festival is an opportunity to showcase and celebrate the Seattle-area BIPOC leaders building environmentally sustainable communities here in the city, while showing attendees how they can contribute to that work themselves. But this festival might not be possible if it weren't for the years of food justice and climate justice work that New Start Community Garden has advanced.

The garden sits right next to Burien's New Start High School, soon to be renamed Innovation Heights Academy, a small magnet school — a school with a specialized curriculum — that serves students who face challenges in traditional classrooms. Because the school only serves around 100 students at a time, it doesn't have enough kids to field any sort of sports team, so as recently as 2015, only wildflowers and malcontents made use of the school's former baseball field.

That was until a community mentor volunteering at the school approached Taryn Koerker while she was volunteering at a food bank's garden and asked her, "Did you used to be a landscape designer?" When she said yes, he made a request: "Can you come look at this field in Burien?"

After assessing the potential of the weedy mess of a field to become a garden, Koerker and the future garden's co-founder, John Feeney, pitched the idea for a garden to the school's principal, pulled together $800 in seed funds, and worked with students through the Youth Works program to build the first set of garden beds with almost entirely donated materials. By the end of the 2015 summer, New Start Community Garden — also called "Shark Garden" after the school's mascot — was born.

The garden started out primarily as a project for the school's science class, but over the past eight years, as Koerker and her crew of volunteers have expanded the garden bit by bit to take advantage of the full 2 acres, Shark Garden has grown deep roots in the neighborhood and has become a lush community garden that donates over 2,000 pounds of culturally relevant produce to the White Center Food Bank every year. The school's science class still has its own plot in the garden, and the attendance rates of students who participate in the garden improves dramatically, Koerker said, but the garden has grown well beyond that.

The garden offers 76 plots, including a dozen elevated beds for individuals with accessibility needs, to community members who want to grow kale, cabbage, or whatever plants and produce they desire. Shark Garden rents out plots for only $25 a year, less than half the cost of a similar-sized, city-owned plot, and people who are interested in getting a plot will probably only have to wait a couple of months, compared with the years it can take to get a P-Patch in the city.

As you wander past the plots set aside for community members and through the winding paths inside Shark Garden, you pass dozens of different demonstration beds with everything from indigenous berry bushes to exotic Andean tubers. In some sections, you can see permaculture in action with perennial plants that stay in place year-round and take a gander at just how much grain must be grown to make a loaf of bread. And along the fence that separates the garden from the parking lot, you'll find a non-edible rain garden that filters runoff to prevent oil and gas from polluting other plots. There's even something Koerker calls a "petting zoo" that's full of fun, fuzzy plants — some shaped like pompoms bring to mind Dr. Seuss's Truffula trees. To bring it all together, in front of the still-standing baseball backstop nestled in the southwest corner of the garden, they've installed a stage that can host concerts and community events.

While all this is exciting on its own, what separates Shark Garden from other urban farms and gardens in the Seattle area, like Yes Farm or the Beacon Food Forest, are the 5 kilowatts of solar panels installed on the roof of a storage container set on the back half of the garden. The solar panels feed power to a battery bank installed in the container below them to create a microgrid that can power the farm without needing to draw energy from Seattle City Light or any other utility in the area.

Last year, the Black-led nonprofit Key Tech Labs collaborated with the local, Black-owned solar company Sphere Solar Energy to get the solar microgrid installed at the garden. "Key Tech Labs' mission is to bring emerging technology to underprivileged areas to help create self-sustaining communities," said Adam Powers, the organization's co-founder.

"The minute I saw what the garden was all about, it was one of those things like, you need a microgrid? I'm in," said Edwin Wanji, the founder and owner of Sphere Solar Energy. "I don't know how we'll pay for this, but let's do it."

To make it happen, Sphere Solar Energy had to absorb some of the costs. But Wanji says he was happy to do it because of the impact the microgrid could have, and because it helps demonstrate the technology for other projects he's involved in, including an effort to build a solar-powered well at a school near Kenya's Maasai Mara, which, at the time I spoke to him, he was actively raising funds to complete.

But here in Burien, the microgrid is already actively powering an outdoor kitchenette that Shark Garden uses to host cooking classes for community members, and some of the power even goes to run FarmBot, a robotic arm that seeds, weeds, and waters a small planter inside a greenhouse. In August 2022, the Shark Garden's solar system also helped power the first annual Burien Solar Punk Festival, organized by Key Tech Labs.

"Solar punk is a concept of technology, people, culture, and environment working together harmoniously," Powers said, and he organized the festival to show the community what that looks like. The festival brought nearly 200 community members to Shark Garden, along with a variety of local, BIPOC-led companies and organizations that are working to advance sustainability and climate action around the city in a way that centers Black and Brown communities.

And with solar panels installed alongside meandering trails trapezing past garden beds full of fruits and vegetables, solar panels that powered music, a VR booth, and a machine that pulled water out of the air, the festival took the solar punk concept and made it real. All together, the festival offered access to technologies and introduced career pathways to people and communities so often cut off from these opportunities.

To showcase the alternate worlds that we can create and that the organizations showcased at the festival are actively moving us toward, the event concluded with a showing of Black Panther, which Powers describes as a solar punk film.

The 2022 festival was the first of many, Powers says. And sure enough, the Burien Solar Punk Festival will be returning for its second installment on Aug. 12, 2023, and Powers even hopes to one day launch sister festivals in surrounding communities like Renton and Olympia, where community solar projects are under development.

With the climate crisis worsening every day, BIPOC communities have the most to lose from inaction and the most to gain from a swift transition, and festivals like this create a space for people to see how they can get involved in enabling and accelerating a shift that will transform their communities for the better.

📸 Featured Image: A photo captured by a drone during last year's Solar Punk Festival shows the solar panels atop the storage container. Next to the container is the greenhouse that contains the FarmBot. (Photo: Key Tech Labs)