Leanne Sowande-Brent was the Director of Urban Ark, a project of the Evanston Environmental Association, aimed at reducing energy and heating costs for low-income Evanston residents. Sowande-Brent was a working mother of four that decided to leave the private sector, take a pay cut, and join the Evanston Environmental Association to bring relief to low income Evanstonians struggling to pay their heating bills in the Main-Ridgeville and Church-Dodge neighborhoods. These neighborhoods were filled with old, drafty homes with poor insulation which led to higher heating bills, and Sowande-Brent argued limited people’s ability to save money. This was just one of many barriers that kept poor folks poor. Moreover, the energy crisis of the 1970s led to drastic jumps in heating costs. Between 1974 and 1980, heating costs jumped 140%, which had an more pronounced effect on working and lower class people. Urban Ark sought to address these issues and give poor Evanstonians a helping hand.
Urban Ark began after Sowande-Brent received a $50,000 grant from the city’s Community Development Block Grant monies in 1978, which was extended into a three-year grant in 1979. The project started with providing home energy audits, consumer advice, technical advice for installations, and retrofitting old homes for solar power at low cost. The Biblical name was purposeful for Sowande-Brent, “I feel that appropriate technology and alternative energy can really address these creature-comfort problems. There’s a feeling that you are drowning in society, that you really need an ark. The Urban Ark is one small part of examining the way we live. Our message is ‘Let’s manage and control what we have.’”[1]
Urban Ark’s work quickly expanded into a community co-op that sold food and energy conservation equipment like woodburning stoves, wood, heat storage rods, and window quilts–which provided insulation but could be lowered and raised like blinds–below market rate. Sowande-Brent was insistent on keeping overhead costs low, so the program had one full time staff member and relied heavily on volunteers so that the maximum amount of money would be returned to the community, not sucked up in salaries. With their original grant, Urban Ark was able to retrofit ten homes with passive solar heating as examples for the community. Soon the co-op grew to over fifty members, but Sowande-Brent had a bigger vision: a credit union with 200 members.
The goal of the credit union was to “lower the cost and the difficulty of making homes and apartments in Evanston more energy conserving and more comfortable, and to otherwise perform as a tool for community economic development.”[2] Members would pool their money and offer low interest loans and grants to other members to help finance expensive home improvements. There were also opportunities to exchange work for goods and services in lieu of money. The credit union and the co-op worked in tandem to support the needs of its members, promote energy conservation, and address food insecurity. They housed an energy conservation library, hosted a variety of workshops related to energy conservation, created gardens on roofs, porches, and balconies, composting, helped residents start home gardens, and promoted recycling efforts.
In 1981 the organization received an award from the Department of Energy highlighting their achievements. Unfortunately, just as Urban Ark’s impact was reaching it’s peak, it disappears from the archive, as does Sowande-Brent. Most likely the organization’s grant money ran out, and it either merged with a private company and continued the work—which was Sowande-Brent’s goal—or the work unfortunately ended. It’s unclear if Sowande-Brent continued her work, or if she was forced to return to a corporate life. Nevertheless, her legacy endures in the homes she helped retrofit and the conversations about energy conservation, food availability, and the plight of the working poor that she started.
[1] Stevenson Swanson, “‘Ark’ tries to ride out energy crisis” Chicago Tribune, January, 8, 1981.
[2] The Urban Ark Community Co-operative Credit Union Flyer, Records of the Evanston Environmental Association, 1957-2009, Collection 371 Box 12 Folder 4, Evanston History Center.