Back in February, students celebrated Solar Education Week, a week set aside to emphasize the importance of staying informed in the worldwide movement toward solar energy. At the University of Wisconsin-Stout, the group Seize the Grid, part of a Sierra Student Coalition campaign that aims to help schools and universities across the U.S. transition to 100% renewable energy by 2030, put together an art based display in the Memorial Student Center. The interactive 
display was meant to inform students and faculty of this movement. The objective of the display was to encourage people to respond to how they see solar energy, and the role it plays, through some sort of creative form.
The display was mostly left up for interpretation. Students responded to this display with an almost overwhelming positivity, including drawing, quotes, poems and other expressions.
As a member of Seize the Grid, I helped create the display, and supervised it during my free time throughout the week. While manning the display throughout the week, I saw an incredible diversity of students and faculty respond to our proposal. I spoke with people about the importance of solar energy on a local and global scale. I even engaged in a discussion that a student brought up about how solar energy seems like it would be a waste here at Stout since it’s cloudy most of the time.
The important thing is that the conversation of solar energy has been brought to light at Stout and across the nation. Solar Energy Week was a success; we were able to bring diverse minds together and hear what people had to say about their hopes for solar energy, as well as the problems that we face with increasing the use of solar energy locally and around the world.
At the Sierra Club, every week is solar education week. To find out more about Sierra Club’s Solar Homes Program, visit http://hhgroupholdings.com/solar/solar-homes/
This guest blog post was written by UW-Stout student Melissa Lackey. You can submit a guest blog post to Cassie Steiner at Cassandra.steiner@sierraclub.org.