Randy Hodges, a civil engineer educated at Vanderbilt University, served as a consultant on the Solar Greenhouse Employment Project (SGEP), a non-profit initiative which sought to address rising food and heating costs and unemployment in rural communities in the South during the late 1970s and early 1980s. The collection contains proposals to foundations; construction design drawings; building instructions; lists of supplies and tools; notes; planting recommendations; correspondence; photographs; newspaper clippings; organizational records including newsletters and project and expense reports; and printed items including brochures, publications about alternative fuels and greenhouse gardening, and copies of government documents, chiefly from the U.S. Department of Energy and the Tennessee Valley Authority. Collection materials reflect the SGEP’s objective to promote self-sufficiency with renewable energy on small and minority-owned farms and its efforts to increase employment opportunities in rural communities, particularly through workshops on solar greenhouse construction in Alabama, North Carolina, and Tennessee.
Randy Hodges Collection on the Solar Greenhouse Employment Project #5771, Southern Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Images from a digitized photograph album from this collection:
