California solar installer Everyday Energy found a niche early in its existence and has installed more than 4 megawatts of solar photovoltaic panels on affordable housing projects in the San Diego area in the last three years.

“We’re growing like absolute crazy,” said Everyday CEO Scott Sarem.

That growth has come primarily from one source—affordable housing.

And the company is paying its success forward in the most mutually beneficial way possible. Everyday has hosted training programs for residents in the affordable housing facilities where it installs solar. The trainings have been so successful that Everyday has hired seven of its employees from them.

“We like to teach people the way we like it done,” Sarem said.

They just hired three new entry-level employees from a training program at the Los Robles Apartments, an affordable housing community owned by Community Housing Works. Four others were hired from similar training programs at past affordable housing installations.

“The whole point of affordable housing is to give people a hand up,” Sarem said. “So it just made sense. We get to train them the way we want it done, and they learn a marketable skill and have a solid entry-level job.”

The jobs are steady as Everyday continues to grow, and there continues to be added funding for affordable housing solar installations in California.

“They’re not getting rich,” he said. “They’re entry-level jobs that pay $12 to $15 an hour. But these are people who were unemployed, and now they have a marketable skill they can use somewhere else, even if they aren’t working for us.”

He said the four veterans of the training program are among the company’s top installers, and Everyday is now sponsoring one of them to get his journeyman’s license, which will bump him out of that entry-level pay bracket.

While some of the residents who went through the program owe their success to Everyday, the company definitely owes its success to the affordable housing market in California.

California launched its Multi-family Affordable Solar Housing program (MASH) about the same time Sarem started his company three years ago. But all $9 million in funding was gobbled up before he could lay claim to any of the projects.

When the company had been around almost a year, someone came and asked him to try to put a package together just in case funding became available again. When one of the 30 pre-approved projects fell through, he submitted an application for his client.

“We found out that, while we were the 30th application to get approved, we were the first project to get done,” Sarem said.

They found a compelling funding structure that lenders were willing to sign off on, Sarem said. And none of the other projects could get through financing.

Eventually other developers started coming to him and asking him to take over their deals, until Everyday ended up doing almost all of the installations in the San Diego MASH program.