Sunday, 10/10/10, started out cool and breezy, but by the end of the day, the dozens of volunteers working on re-insulating an attic, calking windows and installing two photovoltaic solar panels on the roof of a community group home in Las Cruces, N.M., were sweating.

Thirty volunteers with a local chapter of 350.org, a grass-roots environmental organization, helped to make energy efficiency improvements while experts donated their time to install panels on the roof a home, bought to provide permanent housing for the chronically homeless.

The effort was part of 350.org’s international 10/10/10 day of work. More than 7,000 events designed to give people an opportunity to “work” on ending global warming were scheduled around the world. The organization estimated that more than 100 solar panels would be installed around the globe on Sunday as part of the event.

“It was great,” said Abigail Rotholz, one of the event organizers. “We actually had more labor than we had work to be done.”

A ventilation duct had broken and was pouring cool air into the attic instead of the home, said Mark Westbrock with Positive Energy Solar, the company that donated labor for the panel installation.

“We were losing a ton of energy that way,” Westbrock said.

Volunteers worked to repair that.

Installing the photovoltaic panels took only a couple hours because a Positive Energy team had spent a full day preparing the site the week before. The system won’t be functioning until the local utility inspects it and gives it the green light, Westbrock said. That should take about a week.

It’s only two panels and won’t provide a lot of energy, but the system itself is grid-tied with plenty of room for expansion.

Rotholz said 350.org and the Community of Hope, which runs the home, plan to try to fundraise enough to buy 10 more panels, which would be enough to power the entire home.

Pamella Angell, executive director of the Community of Hope, said 350.org’s proposal was a welcome one.

Local organization leader Jade Webber approached Angell just about a month ago and said she wanted to put solar on homeless shelters in Las Cruces.

The roadblock to that was that almost all of the shelters are owned by the city and would take a long time and a lot of paperwork to get approval.

But the Community of Hope operates two homes next door to each other that are owned by Abode Inc., which is basically a funding source for the Community of Hope, Angell said.

“I said ‘let’s do it there. We own it, and we can do what we want with it,’” Angell said. “It wasn’t hard to organize.”

She said the Community of Hope had considered installing solar panels on these two homes, but didn’t have the funding. They wanted to wait until the mortgages were paid off, which will be closed out later this year, she said.

Each building houses seven or eight people, each in his or her own room. The residents, individuals without families, share kitchens and bathrooms and have very few rules to follow other than to be respectful of each other, Angell said.

They are all people who have struggled for at least four years with chronic homelessness. They are usually introduced to the program through the Community of Hope’s day shelter.

“We get to know them there,” Angell said. “And they get to know us.”

Those who seem like good candidates for it are offered a permanent room in one of the two homes.

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Pictured: Volunteers with the Las Cruces chapter of 350.org pose in front of the shelter. Image courtesy of Mark Westbrock.