Preparing For Disasters: Community Resilience Cooperatives

In-person and live streaming (click embedded link)
A Community Resilience Cooperative offers a robust bottom-up meets top-down solution that sustainably and equitably reduces emissions pollution and increases resilience.
By deploying community-owned solar, battery storage with EV backup, efficiency upgrades, and a network of trusted resilience hubs, a community-led cooperative protects its vulnerable populations and keeps its businesses running. Adopting this self-sustaining, decentralized, clean-energy model can deliver immediate backup power, stabilize soaring utility costs, and build equitable, community-wide resilience faster than top-down utility-oriented or fickle policy-dependent approaches.

For context, resilience is sorely lacking throughout Colorado but Boulder County ranks particularly low, facing severe outage risks, wildfire threats, and substantial looming rate hikes. In 2025 alone, local Xcel customers endured an average of 21 hours of outages, heavily impacting small businesses and medically vulnerable residents – and a nearly 6% rate hike!

James Gilbert is a retired electrical engineer who has previously presented (see here).

Please plan to stay for a reception with food, drinks, and conversations afterwards. This event is FREE, but you're welcome to put a donation in the basket.

Hybrid event, in-person and live streaming here:
https://boxcast.tv/view/preparing-for-distasters---building-community-resilience-cooperatives-r8viw5uqb8kcip206tes

Ample free parking right outside. Wheelchair accessible, and we have assisted listening devices.

Our 7 PM start time is outside the busy traffic time, and getting there is easy. We're a mile west of the I-70 exit at Youngfield/32nd Ave (Applewood).
Our venue changed its name from Jefferson Unitarian Church to Common Flame.