By Stacy Metzger //

Four Founders started PV Squared (Pioneer Valley PhotoVoltaics Cooperative, Inc.) in 2002 to create sustainable renewable energy jobs for the historically displaced workforce in Franklin County.

Our Founders saw a lot of empty buildings and infrastructure, relics of the formerly booming manufacturing industry in the region, and set forth to establish a solar equipment manufacturing company. And they wanted to do it as a worker-owned cooperative. That’s because in a worker-owned cooperative, the people who do the work make the decisions together, instead of having them handed down from an executive.

As planning for this idea progressed, a core team of four Founders emerged. They worked with the Cooperative Development Institute (CDI) to examine the feasibility of this idea and found that their original vision wasn’t going to work. So they had to pivot and explore a new avenue.

That critical pivot led them down a new path to establish a solar installation company, one that has proven to be extremely successful. By May of 2002, the company was legally incorporated as a worker-owned cooperative and officially opened its doors in a two-room office in the Venture Center at the Franklin County Community Development Corporation in Greenfield, MA.

As we’ve grown over the years, we’ve paid particular attention to our origin story. It’s incredibly important to us that we stay true to our Shared Values and our goal to provide living-wage, sustainable jobs for the region and have a positive impact in the communities we serve. We work hard to deliver projects that go above and beyond, not just in terms of power production and finances, but also in terms of thoughtfulness and attention to detail. Our client-focused approach has built a reputation for quality and service that is second to none.

We recognize it is easy to think you are doing a good job and making a positive impact, but how do you objectively measure those results? That’s where B Lab comes in. In 2014 PV Squared recognized the need to have third party verification that we are meeting our goals as a socially responsible business, and joined hundreds of other socially responsible businesses and became a Certified B Corp.

We’ve now installed PV systems for more than a thousand clients, each with unique goals and physical sites, and we utilize that experience with every new system we design and install. But how are we doing against that original vision of our Founders to provide jobs for the region? Well, we’ll let you decide. We now employ over forty people, pay a living-wage, offer an extensive benefits package, provide opportunities for ownership, and continue to grow.