Namaste Solar’s 2025 Public Benefit Report

Our Public Benefit

In April 2018, Namaste Solar became a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC), prioritizing social and environmental impacts alongside profit. As a PBC, we must consider both financial and nonfinancial interests when making decisions, aligning with our mission and core values. This report informs the public about our social and environmental performance, reflecting our commitment to transparency.

Our mission is our statement of public benefit: We work to propagate the responsible use of solar energy, pioneer conscientious business practices, and create holistic wealth for ourselves and our community. The following sections share some of the ways we have fulfilled our public benefit in 2025.

Propagate the responsible use of solar energy

17,851 Panels Installed

In 2025, we installed 752 systems, equivalent to taking 3,165 cars off the road, avoiding 15,071,908 pounds of coal being burned, or powering 1,822 homes for a year. Every day we service solar panel systems for our customers (including residential, commercial, and utility-scale) and systems that were installed by companies that are no longer in business. We serviced over 1,806 systems in 2025, ensuring more operational solar is online and producing efficiently as part of our mission to use solar energy responsibly.

National and Local Recognition

In 2025, we won 13 awards that acknowledge every corner of our business including safety, philanthropy, residential install, commercial install, workforce development, and several reader’s choice awards. Our commercial install at the Women’s Bean Project won two awards. We won a residential award from the IECRM Summit Awards for our install at a Single Family Residence in Lone Tree. We were awarded the Top Project award for Vaisala and the Top Company: Energy award from Colorado Biz Magazine. Our community voted us #1 for 3 reader’s choice awards. And we won Denver Business Journal’s Partner in Philanthropy award. It’s an honor to be recognized for our work and voted #1 by our community.

State Policy

Our partnerships and influence on Colorado state policy were strong again in 2025. In partnership with the Independent Electrical Contractors Rocky Mountain (IECRM) we helped build a coalition, including the Colorado Solar and Storage Association (COSSA) and the Governor’s energy office, to write and pass a workforce development law. The new law helps clarify regulatory oversight of solar installation work in the state, ensuring qualified workers are performing electrical work, and creates an accelerated pathway for electrical licensure for solar installers. This will improve payrates and career trajectories for skilled laborers installing solar in Colorado. Our CEO Jason Sharpe was recognized by COSSA as the 2025 Solar Champion for his work on this bill.

PIONEER CONSCIENTIOUS BUSINESS PRACTICES

As a Certified B Corporation, we meet the highest standards of verified social and environmental performance, public transparency, and legal accountability to balance purpose and profit. We continued to prioritize Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) opportunities for our employees in 2025. We continued our curation of the JEDI Resource Library which is full of text, video and audio content that is available internally and to the public. Each month we continue to offer JEDI learning sessions on wide-ranging topics of current and historical interest. To encourage participation, we offer every employee 10 hours of paid time annually for Equity Time On (ETO) to engage in JEDI learning.

Employee Resource Groups (ERGs)

As Namaste Solar continues to grow our equity efforts, we want to build a culture where people can bring their full and unique selves to work. Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) are open to all employees and aim to help foster diversity and inclusion in the workplace, provide supportive environments for groups to connect, along with allies, and improve work conditions by building trusting relationships within the company. We currently have two ERGs: Queer Workplace Empowerment and Expression at Namaste Solar (QWEENS) and Women of Namaste Solar Electric (WoNSE).

Queer Workplace Empowerment and Expression at Namaste Solar

For the past five years, QWEENS has participated in Boulder County’s Pride events. These are hosted by Rocky Mountain Equality (previously Out Boulder County), an organization that ensures the LGBTQ+ community thrives through programming, advocacy, education, connection, and research. Namaste Solar felt it was important to be a sponsor at these events, primarily to support QWEENS and their goals, but also to show up as a business and member of the community.

Women of Namaste Solar Electric

In 2025, WoNSE welcomed 2 new members to the group, all new hires in that same year. WoNSE also has a New Hire Buddy program designed to give new female employees a strong feeling of connection, which research shows increases retention.

Women majority on Board of Directors

For the last three years, women have been the majority on our seven-person Board. In 2025, four out of the seven board members were women. Internal Board members are nominated and elected by fellow co-owners. Serving on the Board is an influential leadership role within the company and an in-depth learning experience that may enhance career advancement. Members listed below include board terms that spanned 2024-2025 and 2025-2026.

Alicia Creighton, Namaste Solar Co-Owner & Director
Bri Morris, Namaste Solar Co-Owner & Director
Carolyn Romero, Retired Chief Accounting Officer, External Director
Daniel Fireside, Uncommon Capital Solutions, External Director
Gwénaël Hagan, Signature Windows, External Director
Juan Blohm, Namaste Solar Co-Owner & Director
Keenan Luebbers, Namaste Solar Co-Owner & Director
Rachel Mountain, Namaste Solar Co-Owner & Director
Susan Graf, Retired VP at Alpine Bank, External Director
Tatianna Vereschagin, Namaste Solar Co-Owner & Director

Create holistic wealth for ourselves and our community

Employee-ownership is central to how we operate at Namaste Solar. We believe in sharing the benefits of business ownership and empowering employees to participate in running this company. In 2025, we welcomed 18 new co-owners and 11 new candidates on the track to co-ownership. When an employee decides they are interested in becoming a co-owner of our business, they embark on a year-long journey of education and mentoring. Overall, the one-year journey of a candidate considering co-ownership is a chance to understand how the business operates, how decisions are made, and to consider if co-ownership is right for them.

Access to Information

All candidates are full participants in our co-ownership meetings. These meetings are meant to inform co-owners of current issues affecting the business, gather input from the cooperative, and provide time for deep dives into important decision-making for the company.

Candidate Curriculum

Each month we offer a candidate curriculum session that prepares them for the expectations of co-ownership, with topics ranging from financial literacy to company governance.

Mentorship

Each candidate is paired with a mentor, someone who is already a co-owner, and together they discuss topics of governance and responsibilities of our co-owners.

Our Community

Part of our mission is to take care of the communities we live and work in. Business can be a powerful engine for change, and we want to use ours as a force for good. A few ways we do this include:

Volunteer Time On (VTO)

VTO offers paid time for any employee to volunteer for a charitable purpose that benefits the community. Each employee can use up to 20 hours of VTO (to be used during regular work hours) per year, which is 1% of work time. Some of the organizations we volunteered at in 2025 include Community Food Share, Boulder MOD Factory, Food Bank of the Rockies, Denver Habitat for Humanity, the WOW! Children’s Museum, and an Earth Month Park Clean-Up in Broomfield. In 2025, our employees spent 362 hours volunteering.

Keep the Lights on Colorado giving campaign

Our annual giving campaign, Keep the Lights on Colorado, raises money for Energy Outreach Colorado, a not-for-profit that utilizes community solar subscriptions and emergency bill assistance to support Colorado families struggling to afford their home energy bills. In 2025, the campaign celebrated 6 years and raised over $27,000 for Colorado families facing energy insecurity. Over the past six years, this campaign has raised over $365,000 to help 960+ families.

Education and Awareness

Nine Namaste Solar employees volunteered 25 hours throughout the year teaching students about solar installation and careers in renewable energy. The committee presented at Logan School, WOW! Children’s Museum, Thomas Jefferson High School, Gust Elementary School, and Bradley International School in 2025.

Assessment of Public Benefit

Colorado’s public benefit statute requires PBCs to assess and report on their overall social and environmental performance, benchmarked against a third-party standard that meets statutory criteria of transparency and credibility. Because Namaste Solar was a Certified B Corporation when we became a PBC in 2018, we were already meeting this legal requirement.

Namaste Solar chose to operate under these standards and practices not just because we are a PBC and a B Corp, but also because we are a group of humans working for the betterment of humans and the environment. Our employees are passionate, excited, and knowledgeable about what they do and many of them have come to Namaste Solar searching for the opportunity to create a difference through their job. We are here to create a lasting positive impact on the world.

More About Namaste Solar

Learn more about how we are transforming energy and transforming business, including our community, sustainability and equity initiatives.

Discover how and why Namaste Solar was founded in our story series, starting with our origin story.

Learn more