We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Alice Min Soo Chun a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alice, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?

We are passionate about designing beautiful products that help make choosing to live a more sustainable, healthier lifestyle easier and accessible. Our solar lights are the new personal devices, thoughtfully designed to provide individualized access to solar energy. We don’t need to wait years for large, expensive, solar infrastructure to act. We believe that each of us has the power to create change now. We invented these lights to help make lives better.
1.6 billion people live without access to electricity.
You can also donate a light to give on our Give a light page!
Our founder
Alice Min Soo chun
As a little girl growing up in Seoul, Korea and then upstate New York, Alice spent many days learning how a simple fold can become structure. Origami forms were taught to her by her mother, who also taught Alice how to sew her own clothes. Always creative, fascinated by design, structure and forms, Alice studied architecture and received a masters in Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. Then became a Professor in Architecture and Material Technology at Columbia University. With emerging trends in material technology resulting in smarter, lighter. faster, sustainable fabrication, Alice started to sew solar panels to fabric as early experiments for harnessing solar energy with softer, malleable material. She became focused on solar technology and findings ways to create clean energy solutions upon learning her son Quinn was diagnosed with Asthma.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

They say the mother of invention is Necessity and the Daughter of Invention is Curiosity. We get curious about the world and why we are here. Questions of purpose and meaning become more and more prevalent as technology replaces so many of our basic tasks. Climate change has confronted some of us in violent ways-natural and political confluence is all interconnected from war to natural disasters. There came a time when I said “this is enough, I can’t sit by anymore, I need to do something to help.” I was teaching at Columbia University and I had already been using solar energy as my primary research topic because when my son was born with asthma, I noticed there were so many kids with asthma in the doctor’s office and then basically, after googling asthma related to pollution, 75% of the pollution in the air comes from building because of energy consumption. And this happens to be a spike and children with asthma and every urban center throughout the country. And even the world.
So that’s when I decided to focus on solar energy. Then when the Haiti earthquake happened in 2010, I quickly turned my studio round to be an Innovation Studio that helped Haiti. That’s when we realized 1.6 billion people live out without access to electricity and they use kerosene to light their world at night, which is a deadly toxic fuel. According to The UNDP 2 million children die each year from the toxic fumes and the impoverished communities that may live on just 3 dollars a day, spend up to 30% of their income on kerosene. I thought “what if they could save that money to use for food and clothing and education, as opposed to this deadly toxic fuel?” I researched every solar light out there. They were all heavy, bulky, utilitarian looking. I’m a Korean American and grew up doing origami as a child and I was inspired by the origami balloon, which flat packs and pops open into a cube shape. This was one of the design inspirations of the SolarPuff.

How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?

In 2015 we had finally created a mass production model of our Solarpuff lights and launched a kickstarter. In 30 days we had raised up to $500,00.00 and we were able to make our first purchase order for our products and send to customers.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

I traveled alone. Delivered our Solar.Puff solar lights to Ukrainian children and delivered our solarpuff lights to two refugee camps and three children’s hospitals in Lviv and Kyiv Ukraine –My trip during Christmas was purposeful knowing that many children have PTSD all over Ukraine. The Air raids and bombings have leave life long scars of trauma on their psyche. The children are the innocent victims who have seen the unimaginable. However, a boy who lost his leg in a bombing in his village was alone at the hospital during Christmas—when I gave him the Solarpuff his eyes widened and he smiled for the first time, thinking of how he would use it for camping in the forest near his house with his two younger sisters. He loved camping and I thought he’s just like our kids in the States. They are just like OUR kids. I met children who witnessed their entire family being shot and killed. One such girl was among the patients at the Okmydyt Childrens Hospital. You wouldn’t blame them if they were filled with hate or resentment, but there, on those beds, the kids were so kind, hopeful, and found forgiveness in their hearts. I found the Ukrainians to be incredibly resilient and filled with courage and empathy. After a yearlong war, in 2023 they still strive each day for peace and victory. Thousands of refugees were in camps set up in different municipalities- All of them women and children who lost their father or husbands to the war. I visited 2 refugee camps where we gave out our Solarpuff lights just as the sun was setting, many homes and areas have constant blackouts and at night the children are terrified of the dark. Our color lights were used for PTSD therapy after Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico and when I heard of the trauma occurring in the children in Ukraine, I decided I must go to Ukraine. Research has shown the effects of color therapy and led therapy, which is becoming a burgeoning industry now and the research shows that more yellow light has a red frequency that helps people with mood enhancement. Different colors are used for migraines, anxiety, and depression. Testing and research was funded by the National Institutes of Health that strongly support these findings. It’s all incredibly fascinating you know a light can actually change your mood. That was something that came up in the 70s but now there is a science behind it and there’s a lot more that’s being done now with the new technology of color LED.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://solight-design.com
• Instagram: @solight_design
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SolightDesign/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alice-min-soo-chun-56860117/
• Twitter: @aliceminsoochun
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDZf2snGEV-d-WZZiHinMZQ

Image Credits
Alice Chun, S.R. Fleissner