Live It
I have always been something of an organizer. Whether it was directing plays in second grade to unsuspecting classmates during recess, or starting a housing and dining cooperative on my college campus serving hundreds of people dinner, I have always enjoyed making things happen. When I graduated college I got offered a job as an organizer, which sounded on its face like it might be perfect!
I called my best friend since I was five-years-old, “I got a job. It pays $9 an hour, is 60 hrs/week, and it’s in LA, should I do it?”
“I only heard LA” she said.
College ended in a flurry and we headed out west. Manifest destiny, wanderlust, the echoing call of the west.. I am not sure. After a month-long road trip we arrived, surfboards in tow (that becomes important).
In college I was a nontraditional activist. Freshman year I realized I was getting fat. I was eating at the dining hall on the required meal plan, and all the excess sugar and salt was making me dozy in classes and sluggish throughout my day. After putting on the 30 layers required to brave the Upstate New York winter I’d realize it didn’t matter how I looked, but I knew I wanted to make a change.
I spent my sophomore year of college going into lecture halls and giving 5-minute presentations encouraging people to join a coalition that would push back against the “Big Corporations” supplying our dining halls. I may have been a little dramatic, the coalition may have been just a coalition of two (my friend Tom and me), but we ended up securing several grants, totaling about $10,000, to start a Food Co-op that provides low cost, healthy vegetarian meals to students and community members cooked and served by the members that use it. It is still running 4 years later, serving hundreds of meals a month and running education and artist events through the space.
Graduating from college, I felt like I had accomplished something big, but when I moved out to LA I felt like the tiniest of sunfish in a very large and beautiful ocean of people. Each day I would go to USC to organize students to fight for solar policies in California as an organizer. Each night I would drag myself home after 12 hours of trying to rabble-rouse with the primitive means of an underfunded, bureaucratic nonprofit. My backpack sagged with the weight of slips of paper I would have to manually type into an excel spreadsheet by hand. I wasn’t really living it. I loved the idea of working to help improve our environmental policies, but I didn’t feel like that was what I was doing. I felt like I was spinning my wheels — and that is where you come in, Inspire!
After a quick phone interview, Meghan likes to remind me I asked her: “what are our next steps.”
The rest is history.
Oh I forgot the surfing part. Well after Meghan asked me to come in for an interview I went for a celebratory surf. I came into the interview Monday morning at 7am with a serious concussion. I am interviewing with our CEO, Patrick, while his head zooms in and out and my friend waits for me in my car because I can’t drive myself.
But, somehow through the fog, you saw a spark.
Now I come into work everyday excited to help consumers reduce their environmental impact by supporting clean power. I am so happy to be able to help the planet by helping consumers switch over to clean power, leveraging technology to overhaul and old system that needs to modernize, and …
