East End Community Services is a nonprofit in East Dayton, Ohio that specializes in providing youth, family, and neighborhood development programs to families in inner East Dayton to help break the cycle of multi-generation poverty. More than half of the children who live in the neighborhoods that East End serves live below the federal poverty line. East End’s mission is to level the playing field for children in east Dayton, by providing them with enrichment activities and experiences that help them close the academic achievement gap.

East End Community Services hosts a number of programs designed to enrich the lives of the youth in East Dayton. East End’s Youth Champions program provides a holistic approach to meeting the youth’s intricate academic and social-emotional needs. These activities and resources include hot meals, academic help, mentoring, community service, college and career planning, drug prevention, case management, college visits, and various leadership opportunities. Their Neighborhood Job Connections program is a job readiness program designed to provide individualized job readiness activities.

East End also does amazing work in the community as a part of their Health, Drugs, and Crime program. They have been on the front lines of the Opioid Epidemic to save lives, working with many partners to create innovative ways to connect people with addiction into treatment and long-term recovery. They hold events educating people about the negative effects of drug use and support a treatment program for recovering individuals. 

East End Community Services is also heavily involved in helping eliminate the food desert in Dayton while also improving housing in the area. With their partner, Mission of Mary Cooperative, a nonprofit that RE-volv and the University of Dayton Solar Ambassadors brought solar to in 2018, East End has installed over 40 raised-bed gardens in income-eligible neighbors’ backyards. Through East End’s Housing and Economic Development program, they have helped build and rehabilitate 84 homes in the Twin Towers neighborhood where vacant buildings stood and turned those into housing for low-income families. 

Solar Project Led by RE-volv’s Solar Ambassadors 

The RE-volv Solar Ambassadors at the University of Dayton helped bring solar to East End Community Services through a 27 kW solar system, which will allow East End to generate 60% of their electricity usage. The Solar Ambassadors worked to help educate the nonprofit about the benefits of going solar, ran a crowdfunding campaign to pay for the upfront cost of going solar, and helped educate the community about the importance of solar energy.

Sabato Dasco, a Solar Ambassador from 2018 - 2021 and the team lead for the East End Community Services project says, “We chose this organization because they have many programs which help the community. They have ties with the last non-profit we helped go solar, [the Mission of Mary], so it was an easy bridge to build and cross. Visiting the non-profit and seeing the people they helped day in and day out solidified that we were in fact making a difference.”

Melissa Padera, a Solar Ambassador for the University of Dayton Solar Ambassador Team from 2017 - 2021 says, “We got to visit [East End Community Services] one day and interact with the kids in the after-school program. It was really exciting to work with such an impactful program.” 

Crowding for Solar 

The RE-volv Solar Ambassadors at the University of Dayton led a successful crowdfunding campaign where they teamed up with East End Community Services to raise the up-front capital needed to pay for the 27 kW system. By going solar with RE-volv, East End Community Services will save more than $17,000 in electricity bills over the life of the system, which East End will be able to invest back into their many programs and services they provide to the community. As East End pays back RE-volv for the cost of the solar system the payments get added to RE-volv’s Solar Seed Fund, a fund that RE-volv uses to bring solar to more community-serving nonprofits across the country. The University of Dayton Solar Ambassadors put together a crowdfunding video for this campaign, which can be viewed below.

Community Partnerships in Action

Thank you to our most frequent solar panel supplier Jinko Solar for donating the solar panels for this project and to CleanEnergy4All for their valued partnership in nominating EECS and helping to promote this campaign.