A neighborhood-owned, sovereign AI mesh for South St. Louis. Built like a forest, not a single tree. Many small nodes. Many roots. Connected through community governance. By the people. For the people.
The AI infrastructure boom is repeating an old pattern. Data centers follow the same siting logic as fossil-fuel plants and waste facilities — cheap land, weak zoning, less political power to refuse. Northern Virginia’s data centers used nearly two billion gallons of water in 2023. By 2030, projections put data-center load at 8–12% of all U.S. electricity. Pacific, Missouri is fighting one of these proposals right now. South St. Louis fits the pattern.
Our response is two parallel tracks. One: we build a distributed, community-owned AI mesh in Dutchtown — small nodes the size of a desktop computer, hosted at trusted community spaces, running open-source software, governed by a Community Data Council of residents.
Two: we publish a non-negotiable set of conditions for any hyperscale data center attempting to build in Missouri. The Dutchtown model is small enough that none of those demands apply to us. They apply to everyone else.
Together they form a complete civic response to the AI infrastructure boom. We build what serves us. We demand accountability from what does not.
A distributed, community-owned AI mesh in Dutchtown — small nodes the size of a desktop computer, hosted at trusted community spaces, running open-source software, governed by a Community Data Council of residents.
For any hyperscale data center attempting to build in Missouri, we demand a non-negotiable set of conditions before construction can proceed. The future of our children is too important to allow extraction without these protections.
Three problems interlock — water, racism, and data. Dutchtown has every marker Big Tech looks for. So does Pacific, Missouri. So do communities all along the I-44 and Mississippi corridors. Without a community-owned alternative in place before extraction arrives, we are vulnerable.
Northern Virginia's 300+ facilities used nearly 2 billion gallons of water in 2023 alone — a 63% jump from 2019. By 2030, data centers are projected to consume 8–12% of total U.S. electricity, up from ~4% today.
Big Tech identifies communities by cheap land, weak zoning, lower median income, higher BIPOC population, lower English-fluency rates, and limited political power to resist. The NAACP's Stop Dirty Data Centers campaign, the World Resources Institute, and Cartwright (2026) document the pattern. These are siting criteria — not coincidences.
Every interaction with commercial AI sends personal, neighborhood-level, and community-level data to corporations that own, analyze, sell, and weaponize it. Residents bear the environmental cost AND the data extraction cost while receiving almost no benefit.
“When xAI built ‘Colossus’ in Memphis, the deal was hidden behind an NDA. Methane-gas turbines were installed along the Mississippi River, just downstream from St. Louis. Local residents were not informed in time to organize meaningful opposition.”
The methane turbines affect air quality across the entire Mississippi corridor — including, potentially, Dutchtown. The failure mode of pure NIMBY organizing is that Big Tech identifies the parcel, the community organizes against it, the landowner gets caught in the middle, and the next parcel is approached. We need a different game.
The Ten Demands didn’t come from a workshop. They came from what residents had to ask for, in public, in real time, when a 120 MW hyperscale was proposed for the Armory site. This is the local context that gives the rest of this document its weight.
Paused, not canceled. The proposal is on hold pending further review. The coalition that paused it is still organizing. We assume the next attempt is already being drafted.
A 120 MW hyperscale data-center proposal surfaces around the historic Armory site in South St. Louis — the same block our neighborhoods live around. The footprint is roughly the load of a small city.
Residents learn about it through fragments: rezoning filings, contractor whispers, an appearance on a planning agenda. There is no community-benefit agreement, no environmental-justice analysis attached.
Organizers from the Environmental and Social Goals Project (ESGP-EM) and allied neighbors begin asking the questions the developer doesn't want asked: water draw, evaporative cooling, cumulative load, dispatchable backup, after-hours noise, taxable footprint, decommissioning bond.
A coalition forms. 13,000+ signatures collected through ESGP-EM's organizing. Allies include MO Workers Center, Sierra Club, neighborhood associations, faith communities. The hyperscale proposal is paused — not canceled — pending council review.
The fight is not over. The Armory case is the local proof that the Ten Demands are not theoretical. Residents asked for them in real time. We are publishing them so the next neighborhood doesn't have to start from zero.
Proposed Armory load. Roughly equal to ~1/3 the peak summer demand of the City of St. Louis.
But no binding contract, no third-party metering, no water-cap clause if technology shifts.
No community-benefit agreement, no environmental-justice analysis, no sworn decommissioning bond on the public record we obtained.
Collected by ESGP-EM and partners. Organizing infrastructure that already exists in this region — not waiting on a permission slip.
We are not anti-compute. We are anti-extraction. The Armory taught this neighborhood, again, that consent is not the default. So we built a model where consent is the foundation.
“Data center” is a category mistake when it’s applied to us. Compute happens at five very different scales. We are at the smallest one — closer to a community broadband antenna than to a hyperscale. The Ten Demands are aimed at the other four.
We use a Dutchtown node like a household appliance — ~1 kW, plug-in, fan-cooled, in a community space. Calling that a “data center” conflates two things that share no scale, no governance model, no land-use footprint, and no labor profile.
A forest is not one giant tree dominating a hill. A forest is many trees of many species, rooted in different soils, of different ages and heights, connected by an underground network — the mycelium — that shares nutrients, signals distress, and stabilizes the whole ecosystem.
If one tree falls, the forest holds. The mycelium remembers where it stood. New growth comes from the roots that remain. The Dutchtown model works the same way — many small AI nodes, each rooted at a trusted community space, connected through the mycelium of community governance.
Every node is itself a small ecosystem. The forest contains forests. We are not inventing something new. We are remembering what life already knows.
A Dutchtown community node draws roughly the power of a kitchen appliance. It is residential / commercial workstation-class hardware — closer to community broadband or a community garden than a data center.
The unit is the neighborhood. The operator is the community. This is Community Compute.
Source · Master Plan v4 §52, scale taxonomy of data infrastructure
We need only inference — not training, not hyperscale storage. So our footprint is a fraction of a commercial facility while serving the actual needs of a neighborhood.
The technology is commodity. The governance is sacred. Every node has a clear nonprofit owner; cross-entity coordination is handled through Memoranda of Understanding.
We sit on top of the neighborhood network layer Connected Dutchtown is already building. Each node is a small ecosystem; many nodes form the forest.
Inference-only nodes (no training). Open-source models — Llama, Qwen, Mistral — running on consumer-grade GPUs (RTX 4090 / 5090 class).
Local-first tools serving residents in their own language. Summer 2026 pilot use case (in development): AI assistance for the neighborhood illegal-dumping response.
Community Data Council. Public audit logs. No face recognition. No predictive policing. No federal access without warrant. Open-source at every layer.
The 30-second pitch“Dutchtown stores its own data in Dutchtown. We’re building distributed, community-owned AI nodes a thousand times smaller than an edge data center, serving residents directly in their own language, answering to a council of neighbors. The forest holds.”
Information environments shape neighborhoods the way water and air quality shape neighborhoods. The right to think clearly — free of attention extraction, manipulation, and forced fragmentation — is a public-health concern. Our local AI is designed around this from the start.
Local-first interfaces with no engagement metrics, no infinite scroll, no recommendation rabbit holes. Tools that finish the job and let you go.
Spanish, Vietnamese, Bosnian — every digital tool and assistance available in the residents' own language, without barriers, fees, or delay.
Environmental health relationships are studied through standard public-health methodology in partnership with academic institutions — IRB-reviewed where appropriate, transparent in design and findings. Wellness services and research are kept separate by policy.
The infrastructure answers to a community council, not a vendor or department head. Decisions about data, models, and use cases are made by residents, in the open, with documented votes.
We don't pretend to have a Security Operations Center on day one. Phase 1A is what it looks like — a single workstation with sensible defaults and a locked door. Each phase adds the next layer. The architecture grows with the work.
A 12–15 member Community Data Governance Council with rotating terms decides what questions the AI answers, what data feeds it, who has access. Modeled on Indigenous data-sovereignty frameworks — OCAP (FNIGC), CARE (GIDA), Te Mana Raraunga (NZ Māori).
Composition targets: long-time residents, recent immigrants, working-class neighbors, youth, elders, ≥ 50% BIPOC, LGBTQ+ representation, disability representation.
One workstation in Sarah's residence. Honest baseline, not a SOC.
Achievable on the NSF Stage 1 budget once we deploy at a partner site.
5–10 nodes, NSF Stage 2 funding, full team build-out.
We pursue cybersecurity and research vetting through two tracks simultaneously, so if one moves slowly the other moves anyway.
Track B alone is sufficient to support our security needs through Phase 1B and into Phase 2. Track A becomes important for grant credibility and federal policy work in Phase 3.
WashU McKelvey, Saint Louis University CS, Missouri S&T, University of Missouri Columbia. Outcome: academic peer review, possible co-authorship, research-grant alignment. Important for grant credibility and federal policy work in Phase 3.
WiCyS STL, OWASP STL, TechSTL QueerTech, Civic Hackers STL, Code for America STL, EFF, Tactical Tech, Access Now Digital Security Helpline (free for civil-society orgs). Outcome: hands-on assessment, free or low-cost first pentest, ongoing community support.
The Dutchtown model is small enough that none of these apply to us. They apply to everyone else. These are not requests. They are the floor below which Missouri communities will not permit construction.
No extraction from local watersheds, aquifers, rivers, or municipal water supply. Cooling must be fully closed-loop, atmospheric humidity reclamation, or recycled greywater verified by independent audit. Zero freshwater extraction.
Waste heat must be captured and delivered to verified community use — district heating, greenhouses, water pre-heating, aquaculture, or other publicly-documented productive use. Heat as resource, not heat as pollution.
No tax abatements. No special economic zones. No exemptions. Hyperscale facilities pay the same property tax rate as any other commercial property — for the full life of the facility.
Public, real-time access to water consumption, energy consumption, air emissions, noise, and heat emissions. All data publicly accessible online, updated continuously. No NDAs covering this information under any circumstances.
Operator funds baseline health surveys, annual community surveys, EMF and air-quality monitoring at residential boundaries, and independent epidemiological analysis at year 5 and year 10. All results published publicly. Operator pays — not the community.
A meaningful percentage of total compute capacity (proposed minimum: 5%) reserved at no cost for verified community use — local nonprofits, public schools, libraries, civic infrastructure. This is the cost of using community land and resources.
At least 60% of permanent jobs filled by residents of the host community and surrounding zip codes. Living-wage positions with full benefits. Independent annual hiring audit. Construction labor: priority for local union and apprentice programs.
A formal community oversight body with legal authority to inspect, audit, review environmental and health data, recommend penalties, and trigger investigations. 51% community residents (not corporate appointees), rotating terms, recallable by referendum.
Legally binding CBA signed BEFORE construction permits issue. Enforceable terms covering all of the above, dollar commitments to community infrastructure, mitigation procedures, and penalty clauses. Community has standing to sue for enforcement.
No NDAs covering any aspect of operations affecting the community: water use, energy use, emissions, health data, incident reports, environmental remediation. The Memphis xAI methane-turbine NDA pattern ends in Missouri.
“Missouri does not lack for places where Big Tech can build. What Missouri lacks is a state that has said no to extraction without accountability. We are proposing Missouri be that state.”
We the residents declare that digital infrastructure in our neighborhood belongs to the people who live here. Nine rights. Bilingual. Poster-ready. Each grounded in research and lived experience.
Modeled on Indigenous data sovereignty (OCAP, CARE, Te Mana Raraunga), the U.S. Fourth Amendment, GDPR transparency principles, and the Detroit Community Technology Project.
Neighborhood-owned internet access — free, open, and without surveillance.
AI assistance that answers to the community, not corporations. Our data stays here. Our questions belong to us.
Know how our neighborhood's technology is governed, what data it holds, and who decides.
Digital tools and assistance in your own language — without barriers, without fees, without delay.
No information shared with law enforcement, corporations, or outside agencies without a warrant and community review. Surveillance is not safety.
Participate in building, maintaining, and governing the technology that serves your block, family, and future.
Mental and informational environments not designed to extract attention, manipulate belief, or fragment thought.
A neighborhood whose digital infrastructure does not extract water, pollute air, or impose uncompensated energy costs.
Bodily autonomy, medical privacy, and participation in decisions about what frequencies and fields surround the people who live here.
The council decides what questions the AI can answer, what data feeds it, what is published versus kept internal, and who has access to what — with quarterly audits and an annual policy refinement cycle. Composition targets long-time residents, recent immigrants, working-class neighbors, youth and elder representatives, at least 50% BIPOC, and meaningful LGBTQ+ and disability representation.
“Data sovereignty” is a phrase that vendors borrow. We use it precisely. Real ownership has five dimensions, and a system that misses any one of them is not sovereign.
The bits live on hardware that the community physically holds. No third-party storage, no remote SaaS root account, no vendor with kill-switch authority over our daily operations.
The community decides what is run, how it is run, when it is run, and on whose behalf. Maintainers serve a Council, not a procurement contract.
Every layer is open to audit by residents. Source code is open. Logs are reviewable. Models are documented. We can answer the question “what does this thing actually do?” in plain English.
Surplus value — revenue, training data, compute capacity, knowledge produced — returns to the community. Not exported, not extracted, not capitalized into someone else’s balance sheet.
The right to say no. To delete data, to retire a model, to decline a use case, to shut a node down. Sovereignty without refusal is decoration.
Vendor cloud gives you Inspection, sometimes. It does not give you Possession, Operation, Benefit, or Refusal. Four out of five missing is not sovereignty.
One node, properly. One Council, properly. Documentation, properly. Funders fund focus — not seventeen things in ninety days. This is the sprint that makes everything else possible.
Phase 1A is already running. Phase 1B activates a first community node this summer (site to be confirmed via active partnership conversations). Phase 2 distributes the mesh across Dutchtown by 2027. Phase 3 hardens regional resilience and ties the work into federal organizing ahead of 2028.
King 95 + SOLUM stack already operating from Sarah's workstation in Dutchtown. Internal R&D, proof of concept, public demo.
1–2 nodes at a community-trusted space. Site selection in active conversation with Connected Dutchtown — partnership not yet finalized.
Nodes across Dutchtown, each owned by a community-trusted entity. Translation, paperwork help, civic Q&A. Many trees, one ecosystem.
Encrypted off-site backup for catastrophic protection only. Federal organizing tied to the 2028 cycle through state and congressional relationships.
A running log of phase progress, council asks, and node sightings — so you can watch the forest grow in real time. New entries appear here as they happen.
After a week of writing, painting, and refining, dutchtownownsdutchtown.org is live. The Bill of Rights, the Ten Demands, the 90-Day Sprint, and the Money model are all public. The press kit (master plan, Ten Demands, Bill of Rights poster, fact sheet, citation library) is downloadable. Thank you to everyone who read drafts, gave notes, and pushed us to be more honest about what we know and what we are still learning.
The Solara Frequency Foundation received its 501(c)(3) determination letter from the IRS, effective April 1, 2026. EIN 33-4532002. Donations to the Foundation are now tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law. The Foundation is the fiscal home for the Dutchtown work.
A single Community Compute node — Mini PC, RTX 4070, mesh-network radio — is bench-running a 13B-parameter open-weight model in a workshop in South City. About 1 kW peak. Quieter than the refrigerator next to it. The forest begins with one tree.
Six revenue streams across five years. The forest does not bet on one kind of weather. Most community-tech projects secure one major grant, struggle for the second, and never reach revenue sustainability — so we budget against the conservative case and treat upside as a gift.
NSF Civic Innovation, Knight, Ford, MacArthur, Mozilla, RWJF, Open Society, plus local funders (Deaconess, Incarnate Word, STL Community Foundation, Invest STL, Beyond Housing).
Once the model is documented and proven, other neighborhoods can license the framework. The aspirational case assumes national replication takes off — we don't budget against it.
Academic collaborations on environmental health, community technology, and digital governance — partnerships sought with WashU, SLU, Mizzou.
The Solara Frequency Foundation's existing certified-practitioner network already generates stable, growing income through wellness work.
If the Ten Demands pass into law and are enforced, the Foundation could manage reserved community-compute capacity. Until then, this is a zero-revenue line.
Direct community support — from individual neighbors all the way up. The cleanest, most durable layer of the funding stack.
The 501(c)(3) firewallThe Foundation is a 501(c)(3) public charity. To protect tax-exempt status, surplus revenue funds a Community Stabilization Fund that grants to qualified housing nonprofits, legal-aid organizations, community land trusts, and tenant-organizing nonprofits. The Foundation funds infrastructure and institutions; partner organizations administer individual-level aid through established, compliant channels.
Proven precedents we follow — Chattanooga EPB municipal fiber ($2.7B economic benefit, 10 yrs); Ammon, Idaho gigabit at $9.99 / mo; 900+ U.S. communities have adopted community broadband; NYC Mesh since 2014 on volunteer + small-donor support.
Civic infrastructure has a habit of arriving in a neighborhood right before the rents do. We are designing this so that the people here today are still here tomorrow — and so that the value the work creates returns to them.
Reserved by policy for direct anti-displacement spending — tax assistance, emergency rent, home repair — for households that pre-date the work.
A dedicated fund inside the project budget — a fixed percentage of every grant and revenue stream — that exists to keep current residents in place. Direct property-tax assistance, emergency rent stabilization, and home-repair micro-grants for long-time households.
Where we hold or partner on real estate, we partner with community land trusts. Deed restrictions that prevent flips, hold long-term affordability, and tether the value back to residents — not to whoever shows up with cash.
The Foundation is a 501(c)(3). The infrastructure work is governed inside it. That structure prohibits private inurement: nobody can quietly turn community-funded work into a personal asset and sell it.
Every meeting, every document, every digital tool — Spanish, Vietnamese, Bosnian, more as needed — at the moment they happen, not after. Language access is not a translation budget line; it is a design constraint.
The 12–15 member Community Data Governance Council seats long-time residents, recent immigrants, working-class neighbors, youth, elders. ≥50% BIPOC. Composition is in the bylaws, not in a press release.
We will not host, train, or sell capacity to AI workloads whose business model is mass labor displacement, predictive policing, biometric surveillance, eviction-scoring, or generative substitution of local creative work.
Maintenance, training, translation, council coordination, and community-research jobs are filled from Dutchtown first. Apprenticeship pathways are real, not branding. Wages reflect cost of living, not extraction.
We are not promising a roster of celebrity allies. We are publishing the structure of the work and naming the seats we need to fill. If you see yourself in one of these roles, we want to talk.
Thirteen years in uniform. Then a sudden, severe seizure disorder that conventional medicine could not stop. Sarah rebuilt her health from the ground up — whole foods, sleep, sunlight, breath, frequency — and got her body back to coherence. She wrote the manual, opened the practice, and trained the trainers.
Then she looked at her neighborhood — the same one being quietly rezoned for a 120 MW hyperscale — and decided the same recovery logic applied to civic infrastructure. Build the thing the body needs in the body. Build the thing the neighborhood needs in the neighborhood.
Holds the North Star, refuses drift, builds the team underneath. Currently held by Sarah Runge.
Carries community legitimacy, opens doors, holds relationships. Recruiting from neighborhood leaders, faith communities, and existing civic institutions.
Hardware deployment, software, security updates, incident response. Recruiting from local tech communities — TechSTL, Civic Hackers STL, Code for America's STL Brigade.
Translates between residents and engineers; turns lived experience into design choices. Recruiting from librarians, community-college instructors, and civic journalists.
Penetration testing, audits, MOUs, nonprofit and IP counsel. Recruiting pro bono partners and outreach to ACLU, EFF, and Women in Cybersecurity.
This work belongs to all of us. Pledge support, volunteer your skills, contribute hardware or space, or take the model to your own block. Every contribution moves the forest forward.
$7K–$15K builds a community node. $1K–$3K runs it for a year. Less than the cost of one police camera. Pledge any amount below and we’ll follow up with the giving link.
Tell us how you want to help. We’ll match you to a working group — Stewards, Builders, Translators, or Protectors — and reach out within a week.
Everything we build is open-source. Share the plan with your block. Bring it to your council. Adapt the Bill of Rights to your zip code. The blueprint is yours.
Everything we publish is meant to leave with you. Take the master plan to your editor, the Ten Demands to your council, the Bill of Rights to your block. All five documents are real, downloadable, and licensed for you to copy, adapt, and re-publish under your own neighborhood’s name.
We are recruiting for four open roles. Sarah holds the Strategist seat — every other seat we build together.
Community trust, public face, navigates cultural complexity. People in the neighborhood call them by name.
Hardware and software setup, sysadmin, network. They have a Raspberry Pi doing something weird in their bedroom.
Bridges community needs and technical capability. Explains complex things so people feel smarter, not smaller.
Security, privacy, legal, risk. Asks ‘what could go wrong’ before ‘what could go right’.
Until our online giving page is live, we’ll route your gift through the foundation directly. Reach out via thecontact formand we’ll send you the giving link, mailing address, or wire instructions you prefer.
Pulled from the Q&A bank in the master plan. Don’t see your question?Send it our way.
Whether it’s a check, a soldering iron, a rooftop, a research partnership, or a question we haven’t answered yet — write to us. We respond personally, usually within a week.