The third annual Sunstock Solar Festival—the brainchild of rock’n’roll musicians and clean energy activists Skylar Funk and Merritt Graves—is being held on Saturday, October 20, in Los Angeles. This year the festival, which features live music, arts & crafts, food trucks, beer garden, and tabling by environmental and social justice groups, is taking the form of a block party, to be held in Hollywood on Gramercy Place between Hollywood Blvd. and Franklin Ave. Admission is free.
Funk and Graves met at Pomona College in Southern California, where they found common ground in their shared passion for music and the environment. After graduating, Funk worked for a year as a volunteer for the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign while he and Graves cofounded the band Trapdoor Social. The two organized and put on the first Sunstock Solar Festival in 2016.
“I had just read Naomi Klein’s book This Changes Everything, which advocates dramatic activism, overthrowing the fossil fuel industry and overhauling our economic system by whatever means necessary in order to save the planet,” Funk recalls. “I subsequently met Klein and told her about the solar-powered concerts I wanted to organize.
Funk was also influenced by George Marshall’s Don’t Even Think About It, published the same year, which stresses the need for a hopeful, positive message, not Eeyore-like negativity or Chicken-Little-the-Sky-Is-Falling histrionics. “I was convinced by Marshall’s analysis of the environmental movement’s negative rhetoric that we needed to put out a positive message and focus on solutions,” he says. “Along those lines, I love the double meaning in the name of the Sierra Club’s My Generation campaign, which inspired Sunstock’s hashtag, #OurEnergy.”
We’ll let Funk take over from here:
This year we’re doing away with tickets and gates and bringing it back to the community with a Saturday afternoon block party in Hollywood. There will be a solar-powered stage with bands playing all day, food trucks and a beer garden, art and artisanal activities, and vendors and nonprofit partners tabling and recruiting for their good works.
As in past years we’re working with Zero Waste Co. to eliminate garbage created by the festival, and our ethos is always to leave the place cleaner and in better shape than the way we found it. And as always, 100 percent of any profits we make will be donated to GRID Alternatives for charity solar roof installation.
Our goal all along has been to create a warm estuary of community, music, and action—a place to give our activist allies some much-needed time to celebrate. We wanted to expose local music fans to the inspiring work of our nonprofit partners and give each member of our community a platform for doing the work that inspires them, be it working on the solar-powered stage, making the event zero-waste, or creating visual art or music that calls for change. Sunstock wanted to be all those things.
We’ve faced huge challenges and setbacks. We lost six digits on each of our first two festivals. I commit about seven solid months trying to make each event the best it can be, and make the greatest positive impact on the world we possibly can. Sunstock has been a dream, a passion project, my baby, and something for which my team has made huge sacrifices.
The block party will be open to the public—we’re excited that it will be so accessible—but we are accepting donations (suggested: $15 per attendee) on Venmo, @SunstockSolFest. If we keep losing money doing this, it will cease to be sustainable for us and we won’t be able to keep doing it. But we’ll cross that bridge… well… here’s hoping we never have to cross it. Haha.
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Read more about Trapdoor Social and Sunstock and check out this Funk-y video.
