lauren + the claremont energy challenge

An account of my summer interning for the Claremont Energy Challenge in Claremont, California | A DSIP blog for Claremont McKenna College

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Being a busy bee

As my last post for the course, I just want to take some time to acknowledge the other activities I spent my time on this summer!

Firstly, I was a tour guide for the admissions office, both for MAC (Multicultural Advisory Council) and regular tours. I gave campus tours to visiting students and parents, as well as special group tours for student organizations such as A Better Chance and Upward Bound who came to visit campus. 

I was just recently hired as a tour guide on campus, so this summer was an exciting opportunity to practice and refine my personal tour. I was president of my high school’s student ambassador club, which did similar functions as our Office of Admission, such as tours, shadowing, and open houses. 

If you ask any of my friends, they’ll tell you that I absolutely love to talk—especially when it’s a subject that interests me. Luckily, CMC is one of those very subjects, so giving campus tours is one of my favorite activities. I love speaking to my personal experience at CMC, which is as diverse and rich as anyone else’s. I talk extensively about my research at the REC, my work at Harvey Mudd’s Hixon Center, my unique major, and my student-athlete friends. 

Speaking of whom, my good friend and water polo captain Ryan invited me to represent CMC at the Elite Vision Expo in Fullerton, CA on August 1st (check me out at our table, pictured above). Two of my other friends who attended this expo previously warned me that it would be quite crazy, and crazy it was! I nearly lost my voice speaking to over 1,000 students and parents that day, answering questions as basic as “What is Claremont McKenna?” to questions as complex as “What is the 3-2 Econ-Engineering program?” 

But, as always, I had a fantastic time doing this—I felt exhausted and proud after a long day there, especially since we were right there next to Ivy Leagues and huge UC schools. I really felt that I put CMC on the map for a lot of students and parents, and I’d feel accomplished even if I convinced only 5 students to apply to CMC! 

Secondly, I did research for my former government professor, Aseema Sinha, this summer. Although I don’t have any photos documenting my work for her, I have done and will continue to do research for her newest international relations project, for which she received a Fulbright grant. The project deals with US-India relations during the H.W. Bush, Clinton, and W. Bush administrations, especially relating to the nuclear deal that transpired during that time. Her new book will specifically focus on how this deal was impacted by non-state actors, namely Indian-Americans, international corporations, and public opinion. 

This summer, Professor Sinha travelled to India to conduct interviews, and, back in Claremont, I assisted her with finding articles, reading memoirs, writing timelines, and compiling a bibliography with over 200 entries. Although some may see this as “grunt work,” I think these are hugely important tasks. As a research assistant at a graduate school or in a professional setting, there is no doubt that I would be doing these same activities. So, working with Professor Sinha has helped me hone my research skills, and learn a lot about a topic I previously had little knowledge about. In turn, I am getting paid for this work, and doing the very important tasks that my professor needs for her book.

When she gets back from India, I will be meeting with her to discuss my work, and hopefully I will be continuing my research for her throughout the year! 

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Update: July 17-23

I can’t believe this was my second to last week here (for the summer). Time has truly flown by!

All of us interns are wrapping up our projects for the summer. As for me, I have several projects that are still working, but are in their final stages. I was so excited to finally be able to send the newspaper shown above out to print. The company I worked with, Gardena Valley News Offset, was an incredibly fast, efficient, and inexpensive printer—and it was overall a much more pleasant experience than I’d ever had with any printer in the past! 

I was the publisher for my high school’s newspaper, and our printing was always the world’s biggest ordeal. We would have to package our spreads and mail them in a USB along with email copies of each spread; then the printer would send us pdf proofs of each section and each editor would have to go back over their spread with a fine-tooth comb to make sure everything was perfect. Then, I would email our printer back with a list of changes to make. When she finally sent it to print, we would receive it within 3-5 more business days. With this awesome offset printer that we used for this spread, we paid a fraction of what we would have paid at any other printer, and all I had to do was mail in a print pdf of our spread by 5:00 pm! The 1000 copies of the paper appeared on my boss’s door the next day at 8 am, all packaged and everything!

These brochures, as I’ve mentioned before, are for Walk the Town. We have brochures from all the other organizations we’re working with: Sustainable Claremont, DRIP, and CivicSpark Easy. By next week, we should be ready to start walking! 

Another project of mine that’s coming to a head is HEA. The pre-registration page is up, so we should be able to start sending out invitations to sign up right away. Check out the logo above! We’re also going to be using HEA in any future “CHERP cities” that arise. So, instead of branding HEA to be specific to the Claremont Energy Challenge or Claremont as a whole, we’re branding it only for CHERP: the Community Home Energy Retrofit Project.

I also made our last newsletter for the summer! Making the newsletters is actually one of the most enjoyable things I get to do. MailChimp is a difficult but customizable workspace, and we send our newsletter to over 2,000 unique subscribers. People always email us back or comment in person that our newsletters are fantastic, and I love being the one who gets to bring the word of our latest goings-on to the community. 

Since I’m going to be leaving at the end of July, but our website, newsletter, and other designing functions need to still be operating when I’m gone, I’ve been teaching a crash course in the Adobe Suite, MailChimp, and Wordpress to our other student director, Jenna. My only problem: nobody taught me how to use my current knowledge of these things! Everything I know about those three aforementioned platforms was largely auto-didactic. I still don’t have a complete knowledge of how to use or do everything on these, and I can honestly say a girl’s best friend when it comes to things like this (especially the Adobe suite) is Google! 

I like to describe my experience as an “ad hoc knowledge” of Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, MailChimp, and Wordpress. I know how to do what I need, and for anything else that I end up needing, I google. 

So, given these circumstances, it was pretty difficult to teach and explain what I was doing to Jenna. Of course, I know that she needs (and wants!) to know how to do these things so that the graphic functioning of CHERP and the CEC is not solely dependent on me. She seemed interested in what I had shown her so far, and I told her to not hesitate to reach out to me with any questions she might have. 

I suppose this is just to say that no matter how much we think we know about a subject, we’re never really done learning about it. I still have so much I could benefit from a knowledge of basic CSS or HTML with our website, and so much I could learn from a proper course in Illustrator, the platform with which I’m still the least familiar. 

In this last week, we’ll be doing more of the same: me “downloading my knowledge” into Jenna’s brain (as Devon calls it), having last-minute meetings to organize our final events, and having team meetings to discuss the direction of the CEC for next semester. I can’t wait to come back and start working again in the fall, but I’m looking forward to a nice month-long break! 

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Update: July 13-19

This update’s going to be pretty short, because (I hate to say it!) this week has been pretty relaxed.

I’ve been much more involved in Roberts Environmental Center business this summer, which I have really enjoyed. It’s fun and interesting to be involved in the leadership structure of an organization you work for. Kristin Miller, our fantastic administrative assistant, has been asking me for help and advice on what I’d like to see be different about the REC, possibilities for our involvement and collaboration with other research institutes on campus, new projects for the 2015-2016 school year, and ideas for student leadership in our institute. I was invited to a board meeting in which we discussed existing and new projects with board members and our faculty director, Bill Ascher.

But, Kristin is also in charge of the REC’s website and other PR, and we had been discussing the possibility of a newsletter this year. She knows that I am in charge of similar tasks for the Claremont Energy Challenge, so she asked my advice and I’m helping her build a newsletter on MailChimp!

The newsletter is going to detail all the projects that we worked on in the 2014-2015 school year, including photos and links to more content. A little working preview is shown above!

This week I’ve also been working hard on HEA.com. HEA stands for Home Energy Analytics, and they’re a California software company that works with utilities to analyze and disaggregate your energy bill. When the resident signs up for HEA, they will scan a home’s smart meter and send a bimonthly report to the homeowner with a breakdown of where the costs on their energy bill came from. As in, “35% of your bill came from the kitchen: your fridge, stove, dishwasher,” etc. HEA will also give a list of tips and steps to take to lower that energy bill, including home retrofits. As in, “If you buy this Energy Star® dishwasher, your energy bill will decrease by x amount.”

It took us a very long time and a very large amount of money to finally solidify our partnership with HEA, but we finally have it! We’re hoping that the portal will be up by MONDAY! so that people can start signing up. There have been lots of delays with SoCal Edison and SoCal Gas, but homeowners should hopefully still be able to use HEA by next week and start looking at their bills.

I’ve been working with Lisa, one of the founders of HEA, to design our interface. A screenshot of our very own pre-registration page is above. I learned how to make mockups and create/modify branding guidelines just like that of Harvey Mudd that I mentioned in the last post. It’s been really great experience communicating back and forth with her, and I’ve learned how difficult partnerships like this can be. However, Lisa is very helpful and our own “CHERP Home Energy Analyzer” is going well!

I hope I continue to see progress on both fronts of these projects!

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Update: July 6 - July 12

Follow the leader? 

Fun week, even more fun weekend! My parents and sister visited me and we went up to L.A. for the weekend. Saturday was their anniversary, so my sister and I met with my sister’s best friend and her boyfriend for dinner and explored the city. 

This week was a little crazy, and I was a bit overwhelmed with projects. However, one thing that I have learned about myself is that I love being busy. I much prefer the stress and obstacles that come with being busy to the boredom and calm of not having enough to do. 

The “artwork” that you see above is one of many projects I just recently ramped up this week. As I mentioned earlier, I am the newly hired Web & Social Media Coordinator for the Hixon Center for Sustainable Environmental Design at Harvey Mudd College (wow, that’s a mouthful). Although Professor Srebotnjak hired me quite a few weeks ago, I haven’t been able to start my work because of logistical obstacles (IT help needed for the website, dialogue with HMC Communications office needed for social media). 

However, this week, I had a meeting with Stephanie Graham, the Director of Communications for HMC, and we discussed all the info and rules I’d need to start up the Twitter and Facebook for the Hixon Center. Since the Hixon Center is very much a part of HMC, I would need to follow Harvey Mudd’s “Identity Standards,” color palettes, font restrictions, etc. Although I was a little miffed reading HMC’s identity standards, I realized that any business with a brand, logo, seal, etc. would definitely have standards like this, if not more complex. Reading over the standards again, I noticed that their guidelines are really not even that complex and restrictive, as that of some large corporations might be. All this is great practice if and when I want to work for the communications office of any company or organization. 

You can check out the Hixon Center profiles on Twitter and Facebook! 

Another organization that I began working with this week is Know Tomorrow, an initiative founded by CoolGlobes, a public art project dedicated to spreading awareness of climate change. KnowTomorrow is a nationwide project whose mission is to engage millennials (i.e. college students) in the topic of climate change, from speakers series to daytime activities, all promoting awareness and action on sustainability and renewables. Over 60 colleges have signed up to host a Know Tomorrow Day, which will occur nationally on October 2nd. 

Pomona, Pitzer, and Scripps have signed up as well, and the Know Tomorrow of the Claremont Colleges is the largest and most planned out thus far. I’ve been working with and communicating with a fellow rising sophomore at Pomona, Tom, who actually is the K-12 Education Director for the Claremont Energy Challenge. He wants to get the CEC involved in Know Tomorrow, so we’re hosting a booth at the event and our Exec Director, Devon Hartman, is going to be one of the evening speakers. 

Know Tomorrow, like the CEC, is a new baby organization, and their goal is also to reach a large audience in a short amount of time. Granted, their target audience is much larger than ours, and their time frame is shorter. However, it’s important for groups like the two of us to help each other out, because our connections and resources are invaluable to the other. For example, we’ve had over 75 students at the Claremont Colleges express interest in helping out with the Claremont Energy Challenge, and we’re going to reach back out to them and ask for their interest in helping with Know Tomorrow. Similarly, we hope that Know Tomorrow’s national connections can help us out after their launch day on October 2nd, giving us possible leaders, recognition, or support beyond Claremont. 

I had an interesting conversation recently with a high school student who told Devon that he wanted to help out with the Claremont Energy Challenge. He and I exchanged emails a few times, and I invited him to come up to our office and meet all of us and see possibly where he would be interested in lending his skills or time. 

I truly forgot how awkward high schoolers can be. I feel so far removed from high school, but in reality, I was still in high school not 14 months ago! The student, a rising senior at Claremont High School, seemed a little lost when I spoke to him. He didn’t entirely know what he wanted to help out with, and where his interests lay—which is totally fine! There’s nothing wrong with not knowing what you want. 

Devon and I had discussed making him a point person for our interactions at Claremont High. Next semester, we’re going to start going into schools, telling them about the CEC, and educating them on climate change/energy efficiency/what they can do to do their part. This is going to be a huge part of our Fall 2015 goals, and it’s about 25% of the overall GUEP metrics.

So, we thought it would be very helpful to have a connection or point person at Claremont High! Kristin Miller, our fantastic administrative assistant at the REC, has children who go to middle schools in Claremont, so she knows some of the teachers and administrators. However, we don’t yet have a contact at CHS, so this student could be our first connection there and give us teachers and administrators to contact.

When I brought this up with the student, however, he said something that really caught my attention. “Sure, I could help out, but I’m more of a follower than a leader...maybe I can find someone else to be the leader of that team.” 

Oh man! That was one of the most defeatist statements I’d ever hard from a high schooler, and incoming seniors tend to be pretty glass-half-empty given the impending doom of college applications and decisions. 

In the short 15 minute conversation I had with him, I could tell he didn’t feel entirely comfortable talking to people in general, but I chalked that up to a good bout of social anxiety and a routine lack of self-confidence. 

His statement really made me think about leadership again. Are there people in this world who are born to be followers, and some who are born to be leaders? Don’t we all start out as followers and are gently molded by ourselves, our environment, and others to be leaders? Can’t we develop leadership skills if we put our minds to it and give ourselves the right resources? I’ve no doubt seen that done countless times. 

Quick digression: At our Fourth of July parade, we were looking for a fearless leader to march at the front and lead our routine and chants. Jonathan Wilson, our main contact at the contracting/retrofitting company Home Performance Matters, stepped up to the plate. Upon first glance, he’s kind of an awkward person: unkempt ginger hair, beanpole tall and lanky, braces, ill-fitting clothes, middle-school style etnies. However, when he was up there leading our chant, he took on this whole new persona. He was confident, charming, and overall a very charismatic leader! I later asked Devon about Jonathan, and he said that Jonathan hasn’t always been like this—he used to be as awkward and uncomfortable as a middle schooler—but his new job at Home Performance Matters requires him to deal with a lot of clients and be a charming PR person, so he’s been taking leadership classes and participating in workshops that teach him some valuable leadership skills. Devon said he couldn’t have imagined the Jonathan of five years ago doing what he did on the Fourth of July. 

This story is all to say that Jonathan shows we’re not born followers, but we can choose to be followers. Leadership skills can be so important in the workplace and in real life, as Jonathan has showed.

So, to hear this high school student be so resigned to the fact that he was a follower was pretty disheartening. Followers never make history! Followers don’t set examples, they, well, follow others’ examples. I would never want to label myself as a follower. Even if I don’t think I can quite be a fearless leader in all aspects of my life yet, I’m the type of person who takes the reins on group projects and makes decisions for the friend group. I want my voice and my opinion to matter, and I sometimes loathe having to take orders all the time. 

I’m going to make it my goal to encourage this high school student to really try to become a leader, even if I have to force him out of his comfort zone! Even at CMC, I’ve been forced out of my comfort zone a good few times, and it’s what has made me a better public speaker, a better student, and a better leader. CMC says it values leadership, and I think that it also values the process of becoming a leader, implicitly encouraging its students to be leaders in any small way.

Wish me luck! 

[cecsummer15]

Update: June 29 – July 5!

On the elusive concept of leadership

This has been a really exciting and busy week, let me just say. 

It started off with one of the coolest things that’s ever happened to me: my friend’s mom invited me to a screening of “He Named Me Malala,” the new documentary about Malala Yousafzai’s life. Malala was at the screening, and I had the amazing opportunity to meet her and talk to her! She’s an incredibly sweet and humble girl with a great sense of humor, and you would never have guessed the amazing things that have happened in her life. 

At just seventeen years old, Malala is, of course, a leader and a hero and a champion of girls’ rights (not that she would ever corroborate that claim). She leads in huge ways, but to her, she was just lucky to be placed in a situation in which she can advocate for a cause she cares about. She’s not the first girl to speak up on this front, and she says that she speaks on behalf of the 600 million girls across the world who don’t have access to basic education. 

She’s a leader in a soft-spoken but radically unwavering way. She doesn’t just speak out against the barriers to female literacy. She called out President Obama on his use of drone strikes, especially poignant coming from her, who was born and raised in Swat Valley, Pakistan. She advocates for nonviolence and peace in every way she can, believing that radicalism and war is what caused her schooling to be yanked away from her in the first place. 

Meeting Malala got me thinking about how amazing she is, and how she can make us all better leaders. Like Malala, we all have causes that we care about, causes that are near and dear to our hearts for whatever reason. In our time, it’s so easy to let our causes fall by the wayside, because activism goes against the status quo, and requires time, energy, and commitment. It’s easy to eat at McDonalds and drive everywhere and take long showers. 

In “He Named Me Malala,” a beautifully watercolored flashback tells the story of Malala’s mother. Her grandfather (Malala’s great-grandfather) made her go to school, but she was the only girl in the class, and she had to be in school during regular hours while she saw all of her friends out playing and enjoying themselves. Soon after starting school, Malala’s mother sold her books and joined her friends outside. Normal minds would chastise her mother for being so lazy and uncommitted to her education. But Malala makes the important point of saying: why weren’t my mother’s friends in school also? Why was my mother the only girl in the class? She doesn’t blame her mom for not wanting to be educated; she blames society for instilling those negative desires in her mom’s mind. 

So too do I blame society for making us overly complacent with the way things are, thinking that that’s the way things will always be, and most importantly, making us believe that the actions of an individual will never have impact at the national or global level. As someone like Malala shows, the actions of one person have an astounding potential to affect the larger scheme of things. And even if we are not martyrs for our cause, changing our actions will make us leaders among our friends and family and community. 

The impact of individual actions on a small scale was made apparent yesterday at Claremont’s Fourth of July celebration and parade. Claremont is a unique community, filled with a mostly 65+ crowd, but a crowd that is astonishingly progressive and outspoken on so many issues. 

Devon signed CHERP and the Claremont Energy Challenge up to host a booth and walk in the parade yesterday, and we’ve been working hard to ensure that tons of people show up and walk with us. To my astonishment, we had about 50 people join us, all clad in our bright blue CHERP shirts. The energy was amazing: we had a group of students, infants, dogs (my favorite pictured above), elderly folks, homeowners, contractors, realtors, etc. all marching with us with big smiles and singing a chant that went, “Gimme a C! Gimme an H! Gimme an E! Gimme an R! Gimme a P! What does that spell? CHERP! What are we saving? Energy! What else are we saving? Money! What else are we saving? The planet!!” 

All of the people walking with us had “CHERP-ed” their house (gotten a retrofit), done solar, done landscaping, or done something to make their house and their life more energy efficient. Energy efficiency is, by its very nature, a personal issue. People made these changes to their lifestyles because they realized the importance of efficiency; not because retrofitting your house is glamorous or sexy or will attract a lot of attention to you (like solar panels may). You’d be the only person to know, really, and you’d spend thousands of dollars making these changes all in the name of sticking by a cause you care about.

But nonetheless, we have about 250 houses in Claremont that have already retrofitted, and we got a huge crowd of support in the parade. All the Claremont residents that were lined up at the sides of the street watching and supporting cheered with us when we yelled for saving energy. We had people hold up banners that said “Earth Justice” and “Keep corporations out of government.” It was so incredibly inspiring to see this small community of only 36,000 residents so passionate about an issue—passionate enough to spend their time and money taking the hard (and environmentally friendly) way rather than being complacent with the status quo.

(As a side note: I love the retirees in Claremont. Pilgrim Place itself produces a wonderful population of people who love the earth, who love peace, and who will work tirelessly for the causes they’re dedicated to. Pilgrim Place had some great floats yesterday, but my favorite was a delegation of old ladies and gents holding picket signs that said things like “Drones create terrorism,” “Veterans get a raw deal,” and “Invest in our veterans, not in war.”) 

To see more photos from the CHERP in the Claremont Fourth of July Parade, go here: http://claremontenergychallenge.net/eventspr/event-photos/

To watch a trailer for “He Named Me Malala,” go here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vE5gSHJkusU

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Update: June 22-28!

“Always in motion is the future.” 

Check out what I designed! I’ve basically been working on this project all week, and I’m really pleased with the way it turned out. [This is the spread I discussed in last week’s post.]

One reason I love my internship is that it’s so largely self-directed. My boss, the amazing Devon Hartman of Hartman Baldwin design/build is a fantastic leader, and I absolutely love that he trusts me to accomplish my projects on my own time, by my own direction, and at my own pace.

Yesterday Devon asked me a really interesting question. 

I was telling him about a meeting I had with Professor Tanja Srebotnjak, newly hired professor at Harvey Mudd to teach engineering courses and direct HMC’s brand-new Hixon Center for Sustainable Environmental Design. Tanja, a statistician and engineer herself, is a graduate of Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, has had tons of experience with sustainability, is amazingly passionate about environmental issues, and is very active with the Claremont Energy Challenge. My exciting news was that Tanja has just hired me as the first student employee of the Hixon Center, to be their web and social media coordinator! I’ll be running the HCSED Facebook and Twitter accounts, writing blog posts, adding designs to the website, updating the calendar, creating branding guidelines, etc. 

Upon telling him, Devon was of course super excited on my behalf. I do similar things for the CEC, and he asked me if this is what I wanted to do as a career in the future. I thought about that for a few minutes, and I fell into a bit of a panic as I realized that no, this isn’t really what I want to do in the future.

Don’t get me wrong, I really do love what I do—I have a largely self-directed passion for graphic design and it’s been really enriching and enlightening (albeit difficult) to learn about HTML and CSS in my work with the website. I find myself approaching new challenges every day. I know a lot about Facebook and Twitter, and I’m excited to shape the inception of the Hixon Center. 

I started to panic because I realized that I was signing myself up for these tasks and maybe setting myself down a path that I didn’t necessarily want to follow for the rest of my life. Will all these graphics/web/social media positions that I was putting myself in resign me to a life of always doing that, in my internships and jobs, just because I had experience in that field?

I voiced my fears to Devon, and, being the ever-rational and zen guy I know him to be, assuaged them. Devon told me all about his roundabout life. He grew up in Wichita, Kansas, and began attending the University of Kansas. He dropped out when he was 20, moved to Hollywood, and opened a halfway house for youth on the streets of LA. He began attending an LA City College, and after that, moved to Paris to go to the Sorbonne. After that, he moved back to California and went to Pitzer College as part of their “New Resources” program for “students of a non-traditional college age.” He talked about his struggle to find a major he liked (because Devon is the type of person who likes everything). He eventually decided on Psychology and French. After graduating from Pitzer, he found his love for architecture and went to architecture school, after which he founded the company he owned for 35 years, HartmanBaldwin Design/Build, Inc. 

According to his other venture, Hartman Energy Strategies, “His work has been featured in numerous articles and interviews including Preservation, Wall Street Journal, Remodeling Magazine, LA Times and HGTV and he has worked in France, Peru, Brazil and Egypt. Devon is a General Contractor, Designer, Developer, LEED AP, Green Point Rater, lecturer; consultant; community organizer/educator. Board positions: founding member of Efficiency First, Sustainable Claremont, Co-Founder of CHERP (Claremont Home Energy Retrofit Project), and Project Consultant for the Pilgrim Place Energy Efficiency Project.” 

The moral of the story: Devon finally found his true passion in energy efficiency. The catch: He didn’t find that until he was in his 40s, working in various fields for years, traveling, attending different schools, and gaining invaluable experience. The point: Devon doesn’t regret anything he’s done in his life. He insists that everywhere he went made him the person he is today, and he wouldn’t have been able to find his passion without exploring all the fields open to him. 

When I explained my worries to Devon, he responded by saying that as long as I’m doing something that I loved, it didn’t matter if that was what I wanted to do forever or not. Experience, he says, is the most valuable thing you can have. Any experience, even a bad one, is formative. He asked me what I’ve learned from being at the Claremont Energy Challenge; I told him all about the things I’ve learned about design and coding, and I told him that I loved the nature of this job, that I lead my own projects and that I know how to manage myself. 

He said that, even if this isn’t what I want to do forever, I have learned something about myself: I know what kind of a job I was looking for, and in which work environment I function best. 

He said something very poignant: “There are two kinds of people in the world: those who will get a job, and those who will create a job. Neither of those are good or bad, but I certainly hope that you will become the latter. The best experiences always come from that.”

I admire Devon as a leader because he doesn’t act like he has all the answers, and he admits that every day is a learning opportunity. Although I and every one of us at the office are students easily 30-40 years his junior, he treats us with the respect and deference he thinks we deserve, valuing our opinions and never letting us go one day without knowing how much he appreciates our work. He always has sage advice to give us, and his dedication to all of us, and the larger goal we’re working towards, is amazing.

Anyways, I’m really excited to start working for the Hixon Center, and I remembered why I accepted the job that Tanja offered me. I love being a part of the leadership structure of an organization. Like Devon said, I know my likes and dislikes, and my strengths and weaknesses. I know that I would hate to be a cog in the machine, taking orders from those above me. I know that I enjoy when my opinion means something, and when my decisions shape the direction of a project, initiative, or the whole entity. I can’t wait to work with Tanja, learn more about the Hixon Center, and break ground on something new and exciting. 

[cecsummer15]

Update: June 15-21!

On Walk the Town, and the difficulty of community organizing.

What is it? It’s another fantastic initiative led by the Claremont Energy Challenge! In the months of July and August, we will be “walking the town” with the goal of reaching every single one of the 13,000 households in Claremont and teaching Claremont residents about energy efficiency, focusing on easy energy, home energy retrofits, and solar power. 

In July, we’ll be conducting a trial run and trying to reach 1300 (10%) of the homes in Claremont. 

What’s my role? Great question! I designed the lovely (in my humble opinion) logo you see above, and I am in charge of all the “collateral materials” that we’re leaving with residents of Claremont. 

Our initiative is modeled after the campaign that Claremont Flow organized in support of Measure W on the 2014 ballot, a proposal for the City of Claremont to buy back our city’s water rights from Golden State Water Company. Claremont Flow left door hangers, a newspaper with community testimonials, a tabloid of endorsements, and a sheet describing the issue. 

So, I’m designing roughly the same materials for the CEC! In addition, I’m working with a Harvey Mudd student named Lillian, who is basically organizing and coordinating the entire initiative. I’m basically providing her with auxiliary support.

I suppose one of my biggest challenges so far has been realizing the difficulty in planning an entire initiative. Right now, we’re the CEC’s full-time staff, and the entire project is in the hands of the students. We have plenty of Claremont references and resources, it’s just so hard to mobilize all of them and contact the right people and ask for the right things. 

I’ll be interested to find out the results of my foray into the factors it takes to mobilize a community, as my research paper for the DSIP hopes to answer. In looking at other GUEP initiatives from other semifinalists, many cities have begun launching game-ified campaigns on social media and websites. However, in assessing how we can regularly engage residents of Claremont, we decided against large campaigns on social media because, given the average age of the Claremont residents, social media was probably not a platform with which they were too familiar. So, we brainstormed with Devon (our boss) and realized that Claremont residents were most likely to be reached and starting acting upon a face-to-face visit right at their doorstep. Thus, Walk the Town was born, and I learned that demographics are certainly a factor that needs to be considered when mobilizing a community.

I often think about the fact that the CEC is largely student-led and directed. Of course, we have support from community members, but we are, for the most part, the ones who are executive all of the important initiatives. The Claremont Energy Challenge and the GUEP as a whole are inherently community-based organizations. We, as students who are only in Claremont for about 4 years, really don’t know the key people in the community. We need to rely on other people to give us community contacts, and that just adds extra steps, confusion, and a lack of coherence to our efforts at connecting with residents of Claremont. 

Despite this, however, I’m making some really great connections within the town and outside of it, and I’m excited to see how it all progresses. My goal for myself for this week is to make an awesome newspaper spread, filled with testimonials, pictures, and a succinct message to communicate to residents that appeals to homeowners, renters, low-income households, high-income households, etc.! Coming soon!

You can keep up with Walk the Town on our website! 

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Hello, and sorry for my lack of updates! Here we are: updates for the week of June 8-15!

Learning for the Sake of...Sharing?

Last weekend (June 5-7), I had the absolute privilege of attending an amazing conference at Pomona College, entitled “Seizing An Alternative: Toward an Ecological Civilization.” The conference was actually a meet-up of three conferences, the 10th Annual Whitehead Conference, the 9th Annual Conference on Ecological Civilization, and the Inaugural Pando Populus Event.

The experiences I had at this conference were incredible. On the evening of Thursday the 4th, we heard the conference keynote speaker: Bill McKibben! Much like his books (my favorite of which is Eaarth), McKibben gave us the right dose of realism and idealism. He was very frank about the reality of our ecological situation, especially discussing the dire need to get corporate money out of politics. However, he also expressed an optimism for the future generations, and spoke of the mass social movements arising all around the world in support of his website, 350.org (something I learned: it’s called 350.org to signify 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, a level scientists estimate will preserve a livable planet). 

On the second night, we heard Vandana Shiva, whose talk absolutely rocked my world. Her talk was by far the most inspiring. She introduced the issue of the “violence of the green revolution” and the ecological destruction wrought by fertilizers, monocultures, hybrid seeds, and agricultural corporations. Even in my high school AP Environmental Science class, I found sustainable agricultural practices compelling, despite the fact that the basics we learned were just a drop in the bucket of the world of farming. The issue of unsustainable agriculture, however, is not an issue a lot of people think about when they’re discussing environmental problems, because it seems like it’s something out of our control. 

But Vandana Shiva brought the issue down to earth, and discussed how agriculture impacts her home country of India, especially in her city of Dehradun. She spoke of industrial agriculture and its imposition on the “third world” to indigenous agriculture, drawing comparisons between the idea of knowing the land versus scientific knowing. That is to say, indigenous people value an intimate knowledge of the land, the soil, seeds, and biological processes, whereas pseudo-scientific knowledge of agriculture values constant ‘innovation’ and higher yield, even if that paradoxically comes at the price of sacrificing the dignity and capabilities of the soil and natural seeds.

The next day at the conference, I was able to attend several “track sessions”—the volunteers got an added bonus of not committing ourselves to one specific track (the other conference attendees had to choose one of around eighty tracks to attend for all seven sessions during the weekend!). So, I jumped around, and here’s a little bit about what I learned:

“Becoming Blockadia”—discussing Naomi Klein’s idea of ‘blockadia’ and its applications to the real-life working class & environmental justice

“Guaranteed Annual Income Revisited”—discussing a rejuvenation of the idea of ‘working,’ specifically what the moral implications of a guaranteed annual income would be in the 21st century

“Whitehead & Food”—one talk discussed process theology and the making of food, specifically how modern eating has distanced the consumer from the producer so much so that we are ignorant of the processes of agriculture; another talk discussed the slow food movement in comparison to fast food through Whitehead’s philosophy.

This was an opportunity to hear academics of all kinds—philosophers of Whitehead, graduate students, retirees, religious leaders, etc.—come together to discuss small, often overlooked facets of our ecological crisis. Even the experience of studying Whitehead, a philosopher of whom I had never heard before and to whom at least 10 “tracks” were dedicated to, was inspiring. 

So that’s about it! Just wanted to share my thoughts about this conference, and extend a huge thank you to CHERP and everyone who made it possible for the Claremont Energy Challenge interns to volunteer at and witness this conference!

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Update: June 1–7 

Earth, Wind & Turbines

Another pic from the road! My absolute favorite part of driving up from Phoenix—this amazing wind farm! These wind turbines are awe-inspiring, huge in size, and seem to go on for at least two miles. 

I never knew what they were called or even what city they were near (Palm Springs, fyi), but I did a little research when I reached Claremont and discovered its name: the San Gorgonio Pass Wind Farm. The wind farm in SGP is the oldest wind farm in the country (!!!) and produces about 900 GWh from 4000 turbines annually, which is enough to power Palm Springs and the whole Coachella Valley (!!!!!). Geography plays an important role in the amount of wind a wind farm will receive. Hills and plateaus are great locations to raise up a wind turbine so that the blades are even higher in the sky, where the wind speed is greater. Wide valleys tend to have lower wind speeds, but narrow valleys (aka mountain passes) receive extremely high wind speeds because the air is funneled through the narrow opening. The SGP wind farm falls into the mountain pass category, and has been especially successful due to the warm desert winds mixing with the cooler coastal air. These winds are pushed over the Coachella Valley and through the San Bernardino and San Jacinto Mountains that comprise the San Gorgonio Pass. The San Gorgonio Pass Wind Farm, along with two other prominent wind farms in California, the Tehachapi Pass Wind Farm in Southern California and the Altamont Pass Wind Farm in Central California, accounts for a whopping 11 percent of the world’s wind-generated electricity. Whenever I learned about wind farms and wind energy in my high school ecology and environmental science classes, we’d learn the term “NIMBY”: Not In My Backyard. The term describes a major complain that citizens have against wind energy, namely, that wind turbines are an eyesore, and that no one would like to have them in their backyard, despite their utility. And to that, I say, we should care less about our anthropocentric (especially aesthetic) concerns and more about our lasting impact and our carbon footprints. Plus, I think these wind turbines look pretty darn stellar. 

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Photos from the road - on our way from Phoenix to Claremont on Sunday, May 31st.

Quartzsite is one of my favorite stops, a real “gem” on the I-10 after a huge stretch of middle-of-nowhere desert!

[bratulin]

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the big bear solar observatory in san bernardino county, california. just 30 miles east of claremont!

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about this blog

Greetings! 

My name is Lauren, and this blog is a project for Claremont McKenna College, a liberal arts college in Claremont, California. Its purpose is to document my experiences and lessons learned as an intern for the Claremont Energy Challenge (CEC) in the summer of 2015. 

This summer, I will be heading up the CEC’s graphics and web team, serving as the lead webmaster and graphic designer for the Challenge. In addition, I will be a general intern, and receive the opportunity to attend workshops and conferences, canvass Claremont, and teach Claremont residents why and how they can save energy. 

Claremont was selected as a semi-finalist for the Georgetown University Energy Prize (GUEP), one of fifty mid-size cities all across the United States to be chosen. The GUEP is a two-year competition to quantitatively measure energy and water savings, community involvement, school curriculum, and more—the winner of the Prize receives $5 million and national recognition! To learn more about the GUEP, visit their website. 

I’m extremely excited to be participating in the Challenge, and sharing my experiences on this blog. I’ll be posting weekly updates discussing my thoughts, feelings, questions, concerns, helpful tips, bits of knowledge, problems, solutions, achievements, jokes, stories, and even more! Stay tuned for what’s in store!

Cheers! 

Lauren

[macymichele]

Claremont Colleges and Cacti/ The First Two Off Of My Roll, April 2014.