by Laura Glesby
After 25 years of training thousands of kids and teens to become environmental stewards of their neighborhoods, Solar Youth will close at the end of 2025.
The organization’s board chair, Michael Felberbaum, announced the news Tuesday afternoon in an email and on the organization’s website.
Felberbaum named the city’s decision to close Brennan-Rogers school, which had been “Solar Youth’s home base for after-school programming,” as a factor that spurred “a profound re-evaluation of Solar Youth’s role in the community.”
Starting in 2026, Felberbaum wrote, Solar Youth will be incorporated into Common Ground High School, Urban Farm, and Environmental Education Center as well as the Boys and Girls Clubs of Greater New Haven.
“We will be integrating what’s best from Solar Youth’s programs and values into the structures of these strong organizations,” he wrote.
Since its founding in 2000, Solar Youth has run leadership and environmental education programs for kids from Newhallville, Dixwell, West Rock, and Fair Haven. It co-founded the annual Rock to Rock bike ride, which has become a citywide affair.
Over time, the organization came to focus specifically on the West Rock neighborhood, working primarily with kids growing up in a handful of public housing complexes in the area. Solar Youth ran programming for kids and teens from the age of 4 through high school. Through summer camps, after-school programs, and paid teen jobs, kids and teens at Solar Youth tended to public parks, planted trees, built bridges, cleaned up neighborhood litter, received academic support, responded to incidents of gun violence, and published zines full of creative work.
The organization cleared literal paths as well as metaphorical ones.