Tech for Social Good: Sanjana @ Earth Hacks
Note: This article was originally published in the TechShift Alliance Medium publication. Check out TechShift Alliance to learn more about international, student-led, tech for social good initiatives!
As we continue to navigate the changing landscape of COVID-19, the notion of community care is becoming more important than ever. Community care, which can be understood as building workarounds for systems that don’t inherently support care, can range from anything from supporting others (i.e. bringing groceries to your elderly and immunocompromised neighbors) to building initiatives that work to bring accessible healthcare, education, etc. to your community (i.e. TechShift’s very own digital aid initiative, launched in response to COVID-19). At TechShift, we and many of our member organizations actively practice community care by working with local communities to identify existing problems and collaborate on technological solutions. In this series, we want to continue to explore what it means to practice community care, to inspire ourselves and others to do the same. Today, we’re learning more about Sanjana Paul and her climate justice organization, Earth Hacks, and how they practice community care.
Meet Sanjana — Earth Hacks
Sanjana is the Founder & Executive Director of Earth Hacks, a national nonprofit organization focused on harnessing the power of hackathons to develop student-driven solutions to the climate crisis. Earth Hacks believes that everyone, from engineers to English majors, brings a unique and necessary skill set to the climate crisis. Environmental problems are everyone’s problems, and we welcome students from all backgrounds to join.
What inspired you to start Earth Hacks?
At the root of it, my inspiration stemmed from panic. Perhaps it was climate anxiety or climate rage, but it all culminated into panic. I was 20 years old, studying Electrical Engineering, and I was going to hackathons and trying to use my skills to build climate solutions, rather than worsen climate problems. One of the ways I thought I could do something tangible right now was tapping into the hackathon structure, and centering their purpose on tackling environmental problems instead of pure programming problems. In general, climate hackathons are really cool. Right now, the climate panic is still there, but even if we weren’t in a climate crisis, this would still be a great way to interface with these sorts of environmental problems.
How do you select the specific problems that you tackle at these hackathons? How do you source the communities that the solutions are built for?
Earth Hacks very much functions by supporting students at universities who reach out to us first with an interest in starting an Earth Hacks chapter. In terms of problems to tackle at the hackathons that they eventually host, we generally provide them with options to: 1) Work on problems that the Earth Hacks organizing team is interested in or is scared of or 2) Identify problems in your local community, or identify organizations that are directly affected by those problems or are already actively working towards solutions, and support those efforts or 3) A combination of both.
Oftentimes, we have students who are interested in a specific thing, for example, electric vehicles, but can’t necessarily implement an electric vehicle infrastructure across their state (which may be the use case they’re interested in). In those situations, those students may want to work on the problems of electric vehicles as a learning exercise, and may consider doing a hypothetical implementation, or come up with the most interesting hack using relevant datasets, build an app that compares the carbon footprint from the whole cycle of manufacturing of a car vs. an electric vehicle, etc. Once we’ve identified the area and outcomes, then we write the challenge in a way that takes into account the background of the problem. In terms of community partnerships, we help students do research for that the same way we help them write challenges. We know that drafting that outreach email or making that phone call can be scary, so we help them with talking points, templates, etc. From there, it will vary between organizations, but sometimes the organization might, for example, come and do a workshop for the students and tell them about what they do. Other times, the organization may have identified existing problems and want the students’ help brainstorming solutions, or the organization has already identified a specific use case that they need something developed for. It’s ultimately a very individual process, but we work with students to determine how it can fit into the scope and scale of a hackathon.
Coming from the tech space, I know that tech people have a tendency to overstep boundaries and just be like “we are going to solve all your problems without taking into account what is happening already”, so at Earth Hacks, we really try to encourage a more conscientious and community-based approach. We believe that it’s fantastic that students might have technical skills, but they’re absolutely meaningless if not applied properly, so we try to give more of that broader perspective to students.
What was the process of getting Earth Hacks off the ground?
It was definitely a difficult process to navigate! It was sort of like a cobbling together of me and a core group of friends who ultimately became the cofounders of Earth Hacks. Together, we knew we needed to figure out how to make it a nonprofit, which culminated in different people doing research, then cross referencing our research, and trying to figure out who we could reach out to who could provide us guidance. Setting up the nonprofit structure was definitely one of the most challenging parts for us, especially since the co-founders were all coming from engineering backgrounds (I’m an electrical engineer, and my friends are mechanical and biomedical engineers).
In terms of organizational structure, it has been really organic. We started Earth Hacks in college and focused on our immediate community, so we were perfectly content to just keep on pushing local action and making a difference in the community we were familiar with. Over time, other people started reaching out to us with interest in bringing Earth Hacks to their schools. It made no sense for them to redo all the planning & logistical work we had already done for organizing climate hackathons, so we started sharing those resources with other schools. It reached a point where it was more than one person or one school reaching out to us, so we decided to start putting these resources online. This chain of events is what ultimately led us to where Earth Hacks is today. Now, our organizational partners will also often refer people to us. We’ve been a nonprofit for about a year now and we’re trying to go at it with a more structured approach, and we really like how much we’ve progressed thus far.
What have been some pros and cons of being a nonprofit organization?
I will start by saying that all of our knowledge about nonprofits, nonprofit versus fiscal sponsor, etc. is all in retrospect. We didn’t really realize having a fiscal sponsor was an option when we started out; we just figured that having the combination of numbers and letters that is 501(c)3 is probably good for us. In terms of being an actual organization, it’s great to be able to act on our own behalf, and it makes it easier for people to support us via donations, or for us to apply for grants so that we can continue to support our students and pay our staff. It has definitely been challenging to learn about fundraising, or to find someone who knows about fundraising to join us, and to reach a point where Earth Hacks is consistently raising funds to sustain the organization. Overall, although it has been confusing at times, I think having the nonprofit status has given us a lot more legitimacy, and people (i.e. sponsors or even chapters that we are trying to support) feel more comfortable working with us because they know we’re actually committed to Earth Hacks and thinking about its long-term future, as opposed to being a band of students who decided to do this because we thought it was cool, and might disband at anytime. I wouldn’t say that there have been any strong drawbacks to having the nonprofit status.
Let’s chat about work-life balance. How do you balance running Earth Hacks alongside your full-time job?
I think about climate change literally all the time, day and night. I’m also super lucky that my full-time job as an atmospheric science software engineer isn’t light years away from my work with Earth Hacks, and that I get to work with climate scientists all the time. Moreover, at work, I get to work on stuff related to climate and climate data, which supplements my work with Earth Hacks really well. I’m very lucky that I get to sort of be thinking about kind of the same things all the time, so it’s not like an abrupt shift between my full-time job and Earth Hacks. I think that if it were a situation where I had a job that I really didn’t like or the nonprofit was becoming too much of a drag, it would be a huge problem. It’s also really great that my job is pretty flexible, especially now that I’m working from home. We actually use the Agile approach at work, where everything is broken up in terms of my overarching goals and tasks. For Earth Hacks, I follow a similar system, where we have our yearly strategic plan, and I send out monthly goals for the whole team that we discuss. We then break them up and figure out who’s doing what and by when, so we each have individual tasks. I also have a trusty notebook at all times with my daily to-do list on it, and that helps so much with prioritizing and managing my time. Always try to make sure that you know what you’re doing, so that there’s never any uncertainty. Moreover, it’s also important to take breaks and take care of yourself, because if I’m not functional, I can’t do the work. It’s important to manage your time, but it’s also important to manage your energy. Sometimes, I order the things I have to do as energy-positive and energy-negative tasks, so if I get meeting fatigue, I know what tasks I can do to restore some of that energy.
Where do you want to take Earth Hacks next? How do you plan on growing the organization?
Earth Hacks has been really resonating with the populations we’ve been interacting with so far, but we want to reach a broader audience, both literally and geographically. Interestingly enough, we are operating in a lot of coastal states right now in the U.S. So we really would like to get operations in as many states as we possibly can in the U.S so that we can first build physically that network. We’ve had people reach out to us from South America and Asia who were really passionate about bringing Earth Hacks to their communities, so we’d love to increase our reach internationally as well. As a result, we are trying to figure out how we can scale our operations to meet those needs.
In terms of something like climate policy, we are definitely interest in figuring out how we can continue to better engage taxpayers with more environmental justice and equity questions, and we’re figuring out if that’s going to be through something like policy, or if it’s something like community-building and mutual aid. We’re also really interested in just trying to shift people’s perception of what fields they have to be in to be able to work on climate/environmental problems. Moving forward, Earth Hacks will be focused on both national and international expansion, and figuring out what environmental justice and equity looks like in the tech space.
If others want to get involved or work with Earth Hacks, how should they get in touch?
The easiest way to get in touch is via the contact form on our website, because all of our team members have access to that and we’ll make sure the right person gets back to you.
