The Impact Series: Chris Castro

 Mike and Chris talk about clean energy, public service and a whole lot more. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:04

Hello and welcome to the Impact series on the Green Builder Media Network. I'm your host, Mike Holignan. On this podcast, I'll have one-on-one conversations with leaders and innovators from a wide variety of disciplines. We'll talk about how they got into their field, the lessons they've learned, and advice they have for future generations of leaders. Today, I get to talk with Chris Castro. And he has already had an incredible career, and he's not even 40 years old yet. While still in college, Chris co-founded Ideas for Us, a global UN accredited nonprofit advancing community-led sustainable projects and fleet farming, an urban farming social enterprise transforming underutilized land into edible landscapes throughout Central Florida. He spent almost a decade serving the city of Orlando, Florida, where he held various roles, including their Director of Sustainability and Resilience, and was a senior advisor to Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer. During his time with the city, he started Citizen Energy, a clean energy consulting firm specializing in commercial and multifamily buildings. Now, Chris left the city for good reason, as he was a presidential appointee for the Biden Harris administration, where he managed a variety of programs at the U.S. Department of Energy. Currently, Chris is the founding director and chief sustainability officer for Climate First Bank. Chris, welcome to the Impact Series.

SPEAKER_02 1:24

Great to be here with you, Mike. Wonderful.

SPEAKER_01 1:27

Well, I'm so happy to have you on here, Chris. You've packed a lot into your career, and you're arguably not even to the halfway mark. Take us back to the beginning, though. You're getting your degree from the University of Central Florida in Environmental Studies and Policy, focusing on energy and sustainability. I've got to think your passion for this field didn't start once you got into higher education.

SPEAKER_02 1:51

No, it didn't, Mike. Actually, the story is I got to UCF fully undeclared. Um, I was a student when I was growing up. My um my mom had put me in the international baccalaureate program. Um, growing up in South Florida, growing up born and raised in Miami, um, IB and being bilingual was just part of the culture, right? And so she really wanted to make sure that that I continue that culture as a Cuban American. Um and I was very grateful for it. Not only was it an incredible education, and it gave me this kind of work ethic and discipline that I don't think um others and just traditional public education were able to get. Um, but that gave me a free ride to a number of Florida schools. I remember getting into the University of Miami and I was like, hmm, that's interesting, but they didn't give me any, you know, resources. Uh UF, FSU, um, and UCF was kind of this new emerging. I mean, it had been around, but from our perspective, it was kind of an emerging college and university that was, you know, getting more and more on the map and seemed like it was ripe for opportunity to be able to shape, to be able to really influence. And I was undeclared and at the time was um very passionate about surfing. Um, in fact, I I I relate my love for the oceans to my foundation of why I even got into this space. Um, growing up in South Florida, you're you're often either at the beach or going down to the Florida Keys. I did a lot of snorkeling and scuba diving. I did a lot of fishing and surfing. Right around 10 years old, my parents took me up to Cocoa Beach for a weekend, family weekend, and I got onto a board for the first time. I remember my stepdad pushing me into my first wave, and it was just it was a game changer for me. It was like me interacting with nature in a in the most visceral way. And I was sold. I was completely transformed. Um, and fast forward to, you know, I graduate high school and I'm trying to figure out what to do. And UCF happens to be, guess what? Really close to Cocoa Beach in Central Florida. And so me and a bunch of my buddies that I surfed with happened to get into UCF and we said, all right, it's meant to be. We're just gonna go, we're gonna figure out where to go. And um, and so yeah, long story short, I ended up trying to navigate around where I wanted to land, what do I wanted to do? And of course, that's really difficult for a 17-year-old kid to figure out like what are we gonna do over the long run. Um, I was fortunate to also grow up in a family business. Uh, my stepdad owns a palm tree uh nursery and a landscape business. And so I grew up literally growing trees and um getting my hands dirty on a on a regular basis, right? Um, and I think that that thought was, oh, when I get to UCF, maybe I just do the business administration degree and go back and help the family business, right? Keep keep running the shop. That was my initial thought, not not a lie. And I one of these general education courses, right, these genetic courses I stumbled into was called environmental sociology. I was fascinated um by just the topic that we were learning around this intersection between people and the environment. Uh, and that really gave birth to really a mind-blowing, you know, semester. Uh, every single class. I remember Dr. Penelope Canan just, it was just like blowing my mind on our intersection on our intersections with everything from how we grow our food and the impacts that agriculture have, our energy system, right? Water, uh, ecological and our connection to it, our waste. Uh, and and essentially how you know we needed to make this pivot towards more sustainable development. And I remember calling my mom uh shortly after that course, knowing that I had this gut feeling that something in protecting and restoring, regenerating and advancing a more sustainable future for our community and our planet was what I was meant to do. I I realized it was my purpose, the reason why I was put onto this planet. And it happened to have this purpose and passion alignment that has quite frankly been, you know, I've been on this rocket since that day, um, 18, 18 plus years later. So it's a bit about how I got really into it.

SPEAKER_01 6:00

And and what a rocket it has been. I mean, uh obviously you you can after hearing that, you can kind of understand where ideas for us was, you know, where it came from. And and was one of those buddies uh Clayton?

SPEAKER_02 6:14

Uh Clayton actually, uh, a few a few years later. Yeah, Clayton was at Rollins College, and he was one of the environmental leaders at Rollins, which was just like 10 miles down the road from UCF, little liberal arts college. We're the second largest university in the country, and we're doing all this great work, and certainly saw that this was an opportunity for us to come together and really take things to the next level. At that time, ideas was a couple of years old, uh, and we had really just been a student club at UCF. But it wasn't until I connected with Clay when we said, how can we actually scale this? How can I bring this to Rollins? But also how do we make this a movement and um and really take it to the next level? But it was all around taking action, right? We had a number of organizations that were focused on advocacy and civil disobedience and trying to raise awareness about the issues. And that was absolutely critical. And we were joining those efforts. But at the same time, I was going back to my house at the end of those events and saying, like, what's the solution? If we're going to be taking down this coal plant, like, how are we going to sustain ourselves? We still need lights and power and all. And so my thought from the from the day we were trying to think about ideas for us was how do we create an organization that helps people take action in advancing sustainability in a meaningful way and make it uh almost like a sustainability firm, an interdisciplinary organization. People from the education major, people from marketing and communications, engineering, environmental science, all of us coming together to come up with intellectual decisions on environmental awareness solutions. And that became the acronym for ideas. And we said, my goodness, we started literally doing adopt the adopt the lake and adopt the road program. We brought that to the university as an idea to say, listen, we need to be cleaning up our local environments. Nobody is uh you know, ridding these places from litter. And we want to empower registered student organizations to claim one and adopt one. And sure enough, we took off with that idea. The university installed it, and all of a sudden, today it's you know an ongoing effort. And it became a snowball. From there, it was tailgate recycling, it was recycling in the dorms, it was writing a grant to add solar on campus, it was starting the campus organic garden, right? It was getting the university to commit to carbon neutrality by 2050, all of these different um programs and initiatives that again got people involved in and moving the needle. Um, and and that became kind of you know what Ideas for us is today.

SPEAKER_01 8:44

And and talk a little bit about what it has grown into. I mean, it is it is a global organization.

SPEAKER_02 8:50

It is today, today um we have done projects in over 30 countries around the world, over 300 different communities that we've funded and supported with on-the-ground action. And Ideas for Us really focuses on these five pillars of sustainability that intersect with our daily lives. It's energy, water, food, waste, and ecology. And those five pillars are how essentially our action projects are organized. And um, you know, the interesting thing is in you know, 2012. So we started in June of 2008. And a few years later in 2012, the world is having the largest conference on sustainability. Uh, and it was called Rio Plus 20. It was the 20th anniversary of the Earth Summit that happened in 1992, when the world defined sustainable development for the first time, meeting the needs of today without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs. That became the definition of sustainability in the eyes of the UN. And that summit then gave way to this environmental movement, right? 20 years later, now we're in 2012. And ideas for us, I remember late 2011, I was just stumped online late in the early in the morning, stumbled on the ability of applying to become a UN accredited NGO. And this gave us access to high-level conversations, negotiations about key things facing the world, and gave our ability of students to have a seat at the table. And I said, this is our ability to make this link. Let's apply. Sure enough, we go through this six-month process back and forth with the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, UN DESA, it's called, and we became part of ECOSOC, the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations. And we're one of the NGOs that make up ECOSOC. So 2012, we get the green light. This was like March. And this Rio Plus 20 summit is happening in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, June of that year. And we quickly assemble ourselves and um go down for two full weeks. Uh, I end up being part of what's called the UN Youth Assembly, which was a group of people under the age of 35 working all around the world on advancing sustainability. And by the way, 2012, this is right when the Millennium Development Goals, the MDGs, are in the process of sunsetting. They started in 2000, they were going to sunset in 2015. And the purpose of this conference was to discuss what the evolution of the global goals were going to be. Well, guess what? Columbia's in this room, and they mentioned the sustainable development goals. And it starts going down this path of defining what are the SDGs, what are the 17. It launched the World We Want campaign, which went out to millions of people to kind of prioritize different challenges and opportunities, and it landed on the 17. And so we were at the ground floor when sustainable development goals were being conceived and having input into them. And three years later, at the UN, we're back in the General Assembly getting ratified when the SDGs were approved. So it's been pretty incredible to be part of that engagement and then to then activate ideas for us to be this micro-granting philanthropy, basically this organization that's trying to activate communities to advance projects and solutions that help move the needle on the sustainable development goals and document them, capture metrics, report back up to the UN as a credited organization, and really help show that the grassroots actions are just as meaningful as the institutional changes that we need to be making in order to move towards sustainability. So, yeah, today it's incredible to see a network of organization, you know, of chapters of ideas at universities and communities, uh, really all around the world.

SPEAKER_01 12:42

And it's so prescient in a way because you know you talked about, you know, in the beginning, you were dealing with you know the advocacy angle, the civil disobedience angle. Those are still applicable things today, right? Like we're seeing it happen every day in the United States. Maybe not always about sustainability, but it's still we're called to action. And there you were setting this up with others, obviously, too. But that was at the core of it. It's still relevant.

SPEAKER_02 13:14

Getting things moving. And and and that is, I mean, we would join all of the different big marches. One of the partnerships that we established early on with Ideas for Us was was with 350.org. And back in 2008, 350 was just getting launched, just like Ideas for Us. And a year later, I remember us being an approved 350.org organizer. And so we were the organization that organized 350 actions across Central Florida. And they held the International Day on Climate Action. Uh, and the whole goal was to make the number 350 with a group of people, right? In different places all around the world. And we actually held that at the memory mall at University of Central Florida. And we got, you know, it was interesting because we got shirts donated from different companies for it. Hundreds of people came out and we had the white uh shirts in white that said 350, and then the zero was an Earth that was made up of green and blue shirts and people kind of sitting. It was really cool. I still have this photo hanging in my office. Um, uh, and it was, you know, part of the balance of needing to participate in the civil disobedience and raising the awareness, but also waking up the next day and figuring out, all right, what are we going to do tomorrow to fix this, our campus right now? What are we going to do to actually advance solutions for people to make sustainability the default, the standard on campus, right? And um, and so it was this balance of advocacy, but also direct action. And we are really known as an eco-action organization just because that's what we do and what we're known for: getting everyday people with their hands dirty involved in real, you know, tree plantings, mango restorations, organic garden builds, you name it.

SPEAKER_01 14:54

Well, and I mean, I can't even imagine your passion combined with Bill McKibben's passion. Um, I got the chance to do a Green Builder Media webinar with him once. And uh yeah, that would be phenomenal.

SPEAKER_02 15:06

So uh Bill continues to be, you know, an inspiration, a legend. I consider him a mentor as well in certain respects, because you know, his guide and where he's going now with the focus on really being hopeful for the transition towards renewable energy is is really exciting too. And um, yeah, we're on the same page about that. Internal optimists, no doubt.

SPEAKER_01 15:28

Uh, I do want to spend a moment though talking about uh fleet farming, which is a program within ideas is still to this day, correct?

SPEAKER_02 15:36

Correct. Yeah, it's kind of a wholly owned subsidiary of Ideas for Us. And, you know, the the concept um around getting people involved in some of these projects, some of them actually become viable programs that could continue and actually become not just a one-time action that we did here, but but evolve into something more. And that's exactly what happened with fleet farming. Um, Ideas for Us, we're we're known for hosting a monthly event called the Ideas Hive. And it's our way of bringing our community together, people of all ages, all disciplines to come together and actually begin ideating solutions to these problems. Um and it's really cool. We use breakouts, we use whiteboards, everybody comes up with different draws and paints out different examples, we share, we all add value, and then we identify a project that we can move forward and start raising funds for and implement. And that's the whole idea of the ideas hive. Well, one day we were talking about obviously the challenge with our food system, the industrial agricultural complex, the issue of us being so addicted to this, you know, mechanical industrial system that quite frankly is taking over our land more and more. Um, and it is um polluting our planet, it's polluting our health. And the idea that came out of the Ideas Hive that that meeting was the concept of turning neighborhoods into agrihoods. That was the big idea. How can we actually tap into a lot of this underutilized land, whether it's our front or back lawn, whether it's the little side pocket park on the side of the road here, um, how do, and or our school, you know, garden. How do we start to really activate? And uh we, you know, connected with a local entrepreneur in Orlando. His name's John Reif, and he's a founder of East End Market, which is this incredible food hub. And we approached John and we said, John, we have this really great idea, but we we we need your support. And East End Market would be the perfect partner to help us establish this idea of essentially uh creating a program where we come in and convert somebody's lawn into an edible landscape, edible fruit trees, shrubs, row crops, um, and be able to maintain that edible landscape for the homeowner as a service. The homeowner can eat as much as they possibly can eat, and we'll take the excess and we'll work with you to process this food and sell it into the local restaurants in East End Market as well as the surrounding community. And that became the idea. And sure enough, we just started. We started with my house as plot number one. We started with a plot at East End Market, and East End gave us a quarter acre in front of the market, right off of the road, to be front and center as like the poster of what we stand for. And fleet farming was the entity that was building it and maintaining it. And we just started hosting a bike ride every weekend on a Sunday morning called the Swarm, kind of like bees swarming around the neighborhood. Well, we got on bikes and we were swarming around the neighborhood. And the idea was to help build new plots and maintain current plots that were participating in this program and create this hyper-local food system, right? Literally within a five mile or less radius, we were activating these lawns and we were using bikes to get around and maintain zero emission agriculture, right? The whole concept of addressing the climate through a innovative organic farming solution. So, long story short, we're now 12 years into the launch of fleet farming. We launched this in February of 2014. And today it is a self-sustaining subsidiary of Ideas for Us. It has its own staff, it has its own equipment, it runs basically like its own entity, and it provides excess revenues into the mothership of Ideas for Us so that we can continue to contribute to more grants and more school gardens and the like, right? And feed back into the system. And the hope is that we build more fleet farmings of the world, right? You mentioned Citizen Energy earlier. That was a spin-out of Ideas for Us as well, that became its own small LLC, small energy boutique consulting firm. And in the five pillars, our goal is to kind of create these various social enterprises that ultimately could be businesses, hire people, do impact, and then hopefully connect back to ideas for us and help support our ongoing operations. That's the vision.

SPEAKER_01 19:58

And do you have any idea of like how many lots or acres have been transformed through the fleet farming program?

SPEAKER_02 20:08

Yeah, over 60 homes are currently operated within uh the Audubon Park community of Orlando. Um and this includes not just homes, but homes, churches, school lots, you know, under even East End being one of those, right? Businesses that have allowed us to come in and build either race beds or whatever outside of their properties. Um and so it's been amazing. To date, there's over 30% of the schools in OCPS, Orange County Public Schools, which is one of the largest school districts in the country. I think it's in the top 10, um, has now established a school garden because of a fleet farming investment. Uh, and we every school year get um get funded by the foundation, the school districts foundation, to provide ongoing programming, educational programming every Friday, going into that a particular school of choice to provide them ongoing kind of education about this kind of you know, farm to table concept and sustainability in general. So it's incredible to kind of see how the team has been able to grow and scale it. They've done, you know, literally acres of like a fruit forest that they've been able to build out for actually a professional football player. Um, there's some really cool projects that they've been able to do. And the the concept is how do we scale this? Fleet farming has the ability of going to other communities. And it did in uh in California. A good buddy of mine, Justin Vandenbrock, brought it to Oakland, California. And they ended up starting up with a few plots and ended up turning that over to another nonprofit to sustain it. Um, and even in Uganda, where we have an idea for us major branch, they've created a version of fleet farming called vertical micro gardening, VMG. And it's kind of they've built these vertical towers that are both compost units and they grow food. Um, and because they had smaller plots. And they're putting these at community centers and schools, and they have groups of them, and they're able to grow food and reduce waste. Um, and so it's a version of kind of decentralizing, you know, agricultural development um in underutilized space.

SPEAKER_01 22:14

Yeah, that is an incredible success story for sure.

SPEAKER_02 22:18

That's really neat.

SPEAKER_01 22:20

But then you you come out and you you embark upon the public service portion of your career. You you join the City of Orlando's staff and you quickly work your way up the ranks to senior advisor to Buddy Dyer, who is the longest running mayor in Orlando's history.

SPEAKER_02 22:38

In the country, and at this point, almost in the country, I think. Like, no joke, 25 plus years. Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_01 22:46

And and and that was that was when I got the chance to first meet you. Um, we were in Orlando for the uh inaugural Green Building Media Sustainability Symposium. Uh, and that was in Orlando. What was the highlight, if you can narrow it down to just one, uh, of your tenure with the city?

SPEAKER_02 23:06

Wow. That's a really hard question, Mike. I mean, a decade basically a decade's worth of work into one initiative. That's that's really challenging.

SPEAKER_01 23:16

I would say you did a lot of great work with them in general.

SPEAKER_02 23:20

So the story is I'm I'm head down doing ideas for us and running Citizen Energy basically to pay the bills. As a small business, we were just basically scraping and trying to get by. And I was trying to use Citizen Energy as a way to do that so that I could focus my time on ideas for us, because I was still volunteer, still to this day, have been volunteering that organization, just trying to keep it growing. And I ended up getting this email from the city of Orlando that they had landed a grant, they had received funding to hire essentially an energy advisor, somebody who could help the city think about their clean energy strategy and add to the mayor's sustainability initiative, which was known as Greenworks Orlando. Funny enough, before, and I think I got on the radar of them because I had participated as a community member in developing the city's sustainability action plan, our first Greenworks Action Plan in 2012. And so I'm going to the cohorts and the various meetings, and they're broken out into the pillars of ideas for us. And we're the main organization doing a lot of the work in the community. And so we're there at every single one of these forums, right? And sharing what we're doing and trying to influence the plan. And so, you know, six months later, I get this email like, all right, we got this grant, and now the and the plan's already established. Now the goal is like implementation. So I end up, long story short, landing this opportunity. And I come in and begin to think about how do we focus on reducing the energy consumption at the city, focus on energy efficiency, and how do we create a marketplace to help drive more investments in clean energy for our homes and our businesses. That was the whole goal, right? What's the strategy? Orlando is unique in that we're a strong mayor form of government, very progressive in terms of our ideas, and we also have a municipal energy and water utility, which is a big BFD, as we say, right? Because in Florida, um, it's a regulated monopoly market. And the only way that essentially you can have more control is if you municipalize your utility and your local government controls it. That becomes a real powerful lever to advance sustainability. So having these tools, we start really moving the needle. A year later, I get promoted into the director role. And still, Greenworks is in the mayor's office. This is an initiative, Mayor Dyer's Greenworks initiative, it's an initiative of the mayor's. And my biggest concern was when Mayor Dyer leaves, what's going to happen with Greenworks? What's the focus? So I'd say my biggest contribution, and not to pick out an individual policy or program, because there are dozens. My biggest contribution was permanently establishing Greenworks into the city of Orlando, into the city's code charter, into the actual comprehensive plan, and establishing policies that required an office of sustainability and resilience to be existent in order to manage what we were doing. And that was a big deal. But it's amazing. I mean, everything from helping the city uh, you know, commit to 100% clean energy and significantly move the needle, over 50% of the municipal operations is now powered by renewable energy. Um we did over four megawatts of distributed rooftop on fire stations and community centers, right? The city converted city public land into edible landscapes, into a program called Grow a Lot, where I basically took vacant lots that the city owned and I said, why are we mowing this and spending money? Let's turn it over to a nonprofit, let them grow food and meet our food desert issues, and boom, we take off with this program. Now Orlando is the home of what's called the Four Roots Urban Farm, which is a premier like showcase for urban agriculture across the state of Florida, let alone Orlando itself. Um and so that's an example. That's on public land. It was a strategic partnership with the city. Um we ended up rolling out the first food waste collection program. Uh, actually, for as a city in the southeast, collecting food waste from restaurants uh and you know other commercial properties and diverting that from the landfill to create renewable natural gas and compost. And it was amazing. We rolled out backyard composters for every resident in the city so that they can start diverting their food and composting in their backyard. I mean, in each one of those major pillars, we advanced some groundbreaking initiatives. And I'd say today, by many third-party measures, Orlando is one of, if not the greenest city in the Southeast when you're looking at all of the different indicators. Um, and so it was a real joy and an honor and a privilege to be able to serve the city that I, you know, really made me who I was, that that, you know, I was able to establish myself as a professional and take my lessons learned at the ideas for us level, which was very campus specific, and scale it to one of the largest cities, fastest growing cities in the country. Um, and to be, at that time, I was 25 years old. I was the youngest sustainability director in the United States. And it was just an opportunity for me to be driving innovation unlike I had ever seen. So it was really, really cool.

SPEAKER_01 28:27

Did you ever at any point have other cities knock on your door to say, hey, we'd like to do something like this too? Uh you know, did that ever happen? Did you ever have conversations with with other sustainability directors from other cities as to how they could replicate some of the things that you were leading on?

SPEAKER_02 28:45

Not just in the US, but cities globally. We had cities fly in from China, from Vietnam, from Japan, uh, from Europe that were coming here to learn about what we were doing to advance sustainability in the city. Um, and I will say, as it relates to working with other local governments in the US, no doubt, there is a network, in fact, that we were members of called the Urban Sustainability Directors Network, or USDN. And it actually had a Southeast ARM, Southeast Sustainability Directors Network, SSDN. And then we established a Florida Sustainability Directors Network, FSDN, that has now over 50 members, local governments from Key West all the way up to Tallahassee, counties like Leon County, Orange County, uh, you know, Duval, which is Jacksonville, that whole area. And so it's amazing to see the peer learning and the exchange of knowledge and solutions from city to city and how some cities actually work together to advance legislation and policy together. Um, we did uh an EV readiness code at the City of Orlando, and we worked with the City of Winter Park, Orange County, and the City of Orlando to engage our similar stakeholders and to co-create the same policy so that we had continuity across the region. I mean, that's examples of how, you know, really the partnership and collaboration um, you know, helped us to scale. And the last thing I'll say is it even went further. In Central Florida, we built and established what's called the Regional Resilience Collaborative. What I was seeing is that certain MSAs, metropolitan statistical areas, right, they were establishing these collaboratives around climate and resilience. And the the most famous one is down in South Florida, the Southeast Regional Climate Compact. And it was the four counties of Southeast Florida that came together because of sea level rise issues and saltwater intrusion. And so for the last decade plus, they had been organizing as an entity, as a collaborative to work together. And I said, why are we not doing that in Central Florida? And I approached the East Central Florida Regional Planning Council, which is our RPC, right? And they're overseeing seven counties and like 80 different cities. And I said, this is an opportunity for us to replicate what we've done down in South Florida and try to create a collaborative. And to date, that collaborative is known as the R2C, the Regional Resilience Collaborative. Um, it's one of the best examples of how local and regional governments are coming together to do greenhouse gas emissions inventories, to do climate risk and vulnerability assessments of green, blue, and gray infrastructure. Um they did a tie to the SDGs and they looked at the priorities of the global goals. I mean, across seven counties, and these are of all colors and stripes, right, as you can imagine. So a really cool way for us to share. And Orlando was always kind of that that beacon of light that was driving the innovation and and um people were taking and gleaning from.

SPEAKER_01 31:45

So and the it's like now the whether it be the local uh governments, the regional groups, they're still able to operate, collaborate, and thrive, even though we've seen resistance at the state level in Florida on just even saying the words climate change together. That's true. So they're able to transcend that resistance or those headwinds.

SPEAKER_02 32:13

Yeah, it's really interesting. They have been able to kind of mitigate the the legislature's attack on home rule and attack on sustainability in general. And I think it's these regional governments that are made up of both conservative and and more progressive parts of these regions that are actually coming together, finding common ground, finding the opportunities around workforce development, around economic development, around how to harden our infrastructure so that we can withstand the next major hurricane, which we know we're going to get, right? How do we make these regional investments together so that we reduce each individual cost and we can strengthen us as a whole? And it's that same concept of being stronger, you know, greater than the sum of its parts, right? Um, and so uh yeah, it's really exciting. And by the way, now there's a regional collaborative in pretty much every part of the state. There's one in the Tallahassee Panhandle, there's one in the Duval area in Jacksonville, there's Tampa Bay, there's East Central Florida, there's a Southwest and a Southeast. And they talk on a monthly basis to coordinate amongst the R2Cs so that you know there are things that collectively we could all be moving forward or working with the legislature to enable, right?

SPEAKER_01 33:21

Okay, awesome. So you're there, you're doing great things at the city, but then you get the call to go to DC. Uh yeah. Let's let's first talk about what you were initially brought in to do at the Department of Energy.

SPEAKER_02 33:41

Yeah, this is I'm head down at the city at this time, and I'll tell you, I had a runway of at least another decade of work, like incredible policies ahead. I had a vision of where we were headed, and they continue to move down that path. But I had no ambition of joining the administration, to be honest. I had so much work at the local government, and I saw the importance of local government work during the prior administration, the prior Trump administration, right? When there was this active attack on the federal level to roll things back, but it was the local governments that stepped up, that flexed the muscle, that created climate mayors and a bunch of these networks, and all of a sudden it really was being moved by states and local governments, right? And so I saw the power of cities. I was in the city driving that forward and seeing the needles move and businesses move to Orlando and relocate their headquarters because of our work in sustainability. I mean, no joke. So it was working, and I ended up getting an email. So it wasn't a call, but it was an email from the Office of Presidential Personnel. And to me, it was so random because it said that I was a finalist for a chief of staff role at the U.S. Department of Energy. And it wanted me to move forward with, you know, clicking this link and identifying times for me to do an interview. And I'm like, I just did my cybersecurity training of phishing this thing. Like, I did not put my name in the hat. I wasn't a donor in the administration, like I didn't know why I was on the list. And um, and sure enough, our CIO's office ends up flagging and coming back and saying, that's not a phishing email. You should probably call the number um in the signature. And sure enough, it was the office presidential personnel. And they said, no, this is legitimate. Um, if you're interested, we need you to schedule a time and we'll we'll do an interview. And I ended up doing seven interviews up and down the White House and the U.S. Department of Energy, all the way to the chief of staff at the DOE at the time, to Rick Shaw. And um, you know, the email came in in March. We were doing these interviews up until the end of May. And I basically was to a point where I needed to make a decision pretty quick if this was real or not, because I had a daughter that was about to get into kindergarten. And the last thing I was gonna do is move her during her first year of getting into schools. I'm like, you got to make a choice, uh, or else I'm gonna continue here. And sure enough, they gave me an offer in early June. And by mid-July, six weeks later, I was starting at the U.S. Department of Energy. And my task was to be the inaugural chief of staff and come in to lift up a new office at the U.S. Department of Energy, an office that focused on deploying uh grant money and supporting technical assistance for all of the subnational partners that DOE was working with. Those subnational partners include states and tribal governments, local governments like cities and counties, community institutions like universities and school districts and nonprofits. Those were all the key stakeholders that essentially this office was intended to support. And when I got in there, the bipartisan infrastructure law had been passed. And so the formation was the office was to activate the money that came out of the bill and to start deploying it to those community institutions. So my office was called SCEP, the Office of State and Community Energy Programs. And I came in as employee number one to basically begin to formulate the org chart and the idea. A week later, our director, Dr. Henry McCoy, became my partner in change in this effort. Um, him and I then start to assemble the core team and bring in program managers and detail people from other offices so that we have people to start lifting up these programs. Because we basically have to take, at the time was six billion dollars worth of bill and IRA money and create grants. Because of course, the statute says you're getting $500 million for public schools to help support them with lowering costs. Okay. How do we do that? How do we actually set that up to be most impactful? So we had to take the statute language, begin to work with experts to design what the grant is going to be, how to drive the most impact, and then go through the gauntlet of getting that approved up and down the chain and then actually getting the money out. We have to do that for 26 new grants. 26 new grants. So I'm like, this I'm literally working around the clock. The day I got there to the day I left, I think I was working on average 13 hours a day. I had two shifts, including a night shift after I put my girls down. I had a nine to midnight shift almost nightly, even when I was on the road. And I even had a 10 o'clock meeting. Uh, there was a standing meeting with some of my staff because it was the only time we were able to actually come up for air and begin working on some key things. So, all that said is it was non-stop. It was around the clock. And it was the time that we had to give in order to do everything we possibly could to drive the most impact at that moment. Um, and funny enough, like I get there in July, of course, August of 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act is passed. Big deal with the IRA, of course, the climate law. And we, a couple months go by, first week of October, we get a big email from the secretary, Secretary Granholm. It's called the DOCAS, goes out to every employee at the department. And she summarizes the DOE's now authority that came out of the IRA. How much money? What are our new authorities that we have? And she starts dictating all of the offices that are going to manage this money. And sure, Skep is on there, an additional $10 billion. So we started with six, and being 16. Of course, I have to re-org, figure out how many more staff we need. Like it became a whole calculus. Four months into starting this new office, we get another charge that explodes, right? Triples what we're doing, uh, more than doubles at least. And so it was quite um a roller coaster to keep it light, um, of just trying to navigate the federal landscape of all of the things from procurement to HR and hiring people to program design and getting funding out, to then the selections of the grants to do so through a mayor review process and make sure that you know we're able to obligate this money, you know, as quick as possible to the right entities. And that, by the time I left, we got out 11.2 billion of the 16 billion fully obligated, out the door. That money is in the bank accounts of these states and local governments, and they're doing the work over the this year and the coming years. And so I think it's important to note that you know, DOE got out over 80% of bill and IRA money. It was like close to $100 billion of money that was fully obligated. The money that we hear about being stalled and clogged back, that was the 20%, which is still billions of dollars, but it was a fraction compared to what we actually were able to deploy, which was really cool.

SPEAKER_01 40:36

And all those funds, I don't know, I don't know if it gets lost in the halls of Congress or not, but all those funds were helping people regardless of political affiliation, regardless of you know location. Um it was it was to merely help them and save money and lower cost and drive affordability.

SPEAKER_02 40:59

And to your point, Mike, it was intentional to focus on historically disadvantaged communities, not just Brackenbown communities, but rural communities. They were also fully disengaged and have not been invested in in literally decades. The whole focus was lit, I was part of an interagency working group called the Rural Partnership Network. It was all about how to mobilize our federal resources at every level to support rural communities. I helped lead an interagency working group for energy transition communities. It's called the Energy Uh Communities IWG. And it was all about coal power plant and coal mining communities that were going through an imminent transition. And how do we provide a whole of government approach to help them think through what the pivot is going to be in sustaining their economy and their livelihoods? This was, it wasn't just climate money and go to the places that are doing and keep doubling that. It was literally the opposite. It was intentional to say we need to get everybody else on board and need to focus on an infrastructure that brings those furthest from sustainability into the fold and do so with funding and resources and technical teams. I got to structure a partnership between DOE and AmeriCorps to launch our first clean energy AmeriCorps program and essentially deployed over 100 AmeriCorps vistas to these energy communities to support them with capacity building and just people on the ground to do the convenings, to do the road mapping, to do the interviews, right? Um, and so that was an amazing way. We also established an Arctic Energy Ambassadors Program where we funded with the Arctic Energy Office, SCEP and AEO, funded um 12 energy ambassadors across the state of Alaska. And we put one ambassador in each of the what's called the ARNCs or Alaska Regional Native Corporations. It's kind of how the state's broken up. So each ARNC has an expert energy person that's hired to literally just work the ARNC, go to the local tribes, go to the Alaskan villages, connect with those local governments, bundle project pipelines, be a conduit to federal resources. And it was the first time that DOE was thinking about boots on the ground, actually moving from this agency that was very black box behind the black curtain, you know, national labs and a federal agency to more like what USDA and EPA have done, which is really created a more regional footprint and more place-based approach to the work. And in order for us to make this transition, we have to, it is imperative that we move towards a place-based approach to deployment of the resources, not just the research and development agency, which is what DOE has historically been, but now all of these resources to deploy, to demonstrate and deploy at scale. And that was the charge of Skep and our whole new function at DOE, the undersecretary for infrastructure. Um, that whole function was all about deploy, deploy, deploy. Let's get funds out, you know, these these resources, these technologies that we know are proven. They're working, they're helping Americans drive affordability and lower cost, and oh, by the way, help emissions. Um, so yeah, that was a bit of the work.

SPEAKER_01 44:10

And I love the fact that you were able to I don't know if target's the right word, uh Chris, but um you were able to do some focusing on places where the delta was going to be the largest, right? Like you said, those people who are furthest from sustainability get them closer rather than the misconception that some people have, which is, oh, this just went to you know already existing green pet projects and they didn't really need the money and all this. Like you were looking at really making the biggest impact because the delta was so big.

SPEAKER_02 44:44

100%. The renew America Schools grant. I talked about that $500 million and how do we deploy the biggest impact? $500 million is a drop in the bucket. There's an $18 billion plus dollar gap in school deferred maintenance across this country. And they gave us $500 million. They're like, go solve it. And we were like, what the? And so we had to design the grant to focus on schools that were in Title I, that were lease resources that that that were in these LIDAC communities. And that was part of how we were intentional about getting the money to the school districts that needed it most. Because, of course, any school district, if it was open-ended, would have applied and they would have had a great report and they would have so many more resources to pull something together, and then it would have gone to the Chicago's of the Orlando's of the world. Now, the whole idea was to really get to those school districts that were way far and really needed had deferred 20 years of an HVAC system and were spending ridiculous amounts on their power bill because of it. And of course, you know, the students were underperforming because they're weren't comfortable and b-pa-da-pa, right? All the stuff that we know. And so that's how we needed to be intentional. Let's get the money out to those, and that's how we designed the grants to do so.

unknown 45:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 45:54

All right. So administration changes, turnover happens like it usually does in DC. You quickly pivot to First Climate Bank. I think this is an incredible venture. Uh, let our audience know a little bit more about what you're able to do there.

SPEAKER_02 46:14

Yeah, Climate First Bank is an amazing organization. It's an FDIC insured bank, like a traditional bank that you think about, right? Where deposits and savings are held. But the whole idea is it's a public benefit corporation. It's a certified B Corp bank. And the purpose of starting Climate First Bank was to use our collective deposits to actually use money as a force for good, to help finance the solutions in our communities and not the problem that we're trying to solve. And of course, Climate First Bank, our mission is to really play a meaningful role in decarbonization and advancing a regenerative economy with that banking business model, right? And so while I was at the city of Orlando, in fact, this story starts back when I was with Ideas for Us and had started it. My professor, Penelope Canan, had connected me to Ken LaRue. Ken LaRue is the chairman and founder of Climate First Bank. And at the time, he had started and had been starting what's called First Green Bank. It was his second bank. And it was actually the last bank to get a charter from FDIC post the Great Recession for like a seven-year period. So this guy like gets the last charter to start a bank in America right out in 2009. And they're like, kind of, okay. And and so my I get in touch with him because my professor's like, what you're doing with ideas for us and the students and the communities is what Ken is doing on the private sector. And he's like, you know, basically 30, 30 years older than you, but like you guys got to connect. He ends up becoming a mentor of mine over that decade, even transitioning into the city. I had continued to meet with Ken and see First Green grow. And in 2018, he ends up selling First Green Bank, uh, ends up exiting from banking. And he thought his hands were, you know, he was done. And sure enough, he goes on a national tour, is the story, with his wife, Cindy Larot, amazing artist and and medical doctor. And they come back and he ends up, we go on to our regular quarterly lunch. And at that lunch, he says that he has not fulfilled his uh vision um in creating a bank as a force for good and wanted to invite me to be part of the founding directors in starting this next bank. At this time, we have not named it. At this time, it's just a concept of creating a B Corp bank that we're gonna not sell as the traditional community bank business model, but take this thing national and create a long-term sustainable solution for this country. Um, and and so I was sold. I then started spending nights and weekends working with Ken to think about what the business model looked like. Uh, part of my contribution was saying, listen, we need to really bring in a digital uh experience into our bank because he had perfected the community bank business model of brick and mortar, banking your local dentists and HVAC contractors and providing lines of like traditional community banking. But if we were going to be meaningful in financing decarbonization, it needed to be a completely different scale. And in order to do that, you have to digitize it. And you had seen companies like Mosaic and Goodleap, these fintech companies, who had been really leading out on financing solar, but they were doing it with very high cost capital, private equity money. And there was a way for us to compete in this space if we were doing it as a community bank. And uh, long story short, we brought over an incredible R CTO, Marcio de Oliveira. He became the founder of our sister company, one Ethos, and um, you know, has taken off to be to you know to be a meaningful player in the solar finance game. So all that said is I had been fortunate to be part of the founding team to launch Climate First Bank. Um, when we opened the doors June 1st of 2021, I was on the board of directors. And so I was still at the city, but I was, you know, on the board and I had been on the board for that whole year until the appointment came. And part of the accepting the appointment was, you know, exiting from all of my fiduciary responsibilities and any boards that I was on. So I left ideas for us as board and fleet farmings and like eight other nonprofits plus the bank board. And I um, you know, took a risk to do that. But February 9th, 2024, right? We know the election results. And I end up calling Ken back to be a reference for me because now I have to start finding my next job. I have a family to sustain here, I can't just chill. Uh, and so I call Ken to be a reference. I'm like, can you be a reference for me? I'm gonna, I'm starting to get interest of people who want me to interview for certain roles, and I want you to be a reference. And he told me flat out, no. He said, No, I don't want you to be a reference. Uh, I got a better idea. I want you to one, join us back on the board because we've held your seat and have it replaced it. And two, I want you to join us as part of the executive management team and be our chief strategy or sustainability officer. I ended up taking the chief sustainability officer title uh and really helping the bank kind of scale nationally and prop up our green lending and our mission-aligned deposit and lending customers and you know, really figure out how to continue to infuse sustainability into every product and service they were offering at the bank. And um, so I was fortunate. I took a couple weeks off. You know, I I left, I was booted January 20th, literally day one at noon. Uh, I took two weeks off and I started here on February 3rd. So one year ago, almost to the day.

SPEAKER_01 51:44

I say a well-deserved vacation given all the things that you had had on your plate and the uh the amount of hours that you were putting in. It was uh definitely well deserved.

SPEAKER_02 51:53

It was nice, it was a nice two weeks, although it was nerve-wracking because the first two weeks of of this administration was also pretty chaotic, and I was just seeing a lot of uncertainty ahead. Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 52:04

Um, which we've seen to come to fruition, definitely.

SPEAKER_02 52:06

True. True.

SPEAKER_01 52:08

All right. And we got the chance to talk a couple weeks back, and and you mentioned to me that financially you're able to really reduce the negative impact of the loss of the renewable energy federal tax credit. Can can you talk uh a little bit about how that's possible?

SPEAKER_02 52:24

Yeah, certainly. I mean, since the inception of Climate First, our whole goal was to figure out how do we leverage the lowest cost private capital on the market, and that's FDIC Insurred Deposits, in order to help us finance the solutions towards sustainability, right? That's that's the theory of change. And the issue is that historically a lot of solar financing has been initiated or enabled by fintech companies that aren't regulated banks. They're not using low-cost deposits to deploy into solar loans. They're they're raising money from private equity, which is higher, higher cost of capital, and they're trying to deploy that capital to contractors that are essentially doing their projects, right? And so when we initiated the Climate First Bank, our whole goal was to actually flip the solar lending model on its head and offer a much more ethical and um transparent product for the consumer so that they can truly understand the value that they're getting by investing in solar. The big issue with historically how solar has been financed is this uh concept called a dealer fee. And traditionally, the way that these fintech companies were making the project's pencil was that they were charging the contractors, the solar business, the installer, a fee in order for them to use the technology that they offered and the financing that they had, right? Basically, they were offering the contractor a way to streamline and simplify the sale of your project at the dinner table so that when you're talking right to to Sally or John, you're able to kind of sit down and go through the whole project with them and be able to finance it before you leave. And that was that was wonderful. But the challenge is that dealer fee added a significant cost to the overall system. And in fact, on average, it was between 20% and upwards of 40% of a dealer fee. Significant, not five, not single, no, this was double-digit fee. Yeah, the other thing that we felt was a bit unethical was that those finance providers, those fintechs, also required an NDA with the installer that basically said, you can't disclose the fee I'm charging you to the customer. So when the installer was giving the customer a quote, they were padding their pricing because they had to hide in the fee that ultimately they were being charged, right? And it would inflate the overall system cost upwards of 20 to 40 percent. On average, it was over 30 percent. And what is our federal tax credit? Our federal tax credit is a 30% investment tax credit. So a lot of people were in this kind of, you know, uh, you know, were being sold this fallacy that you were getting this federal tax credit and it was helping lower the system cost. But really what was happening is they were being charged up front to lower the interest rate through this dealer fee. And they were also requiring that that homeowner took the tax credit and rolled it into the loan. And it that if you didn't roll that tax credit into the loan to lower, to keep your payments low, that your payments would jump up, right? And so you had two kind of issues here. You had this unethical issue with the installer, not properly providing a transparent quote to the customer. And then you had this situation where the customer still had to take the tax credit and roll it into the loan when they got it, whether they wanted to or not, and whether they achieved the full 30% tax credit or not, right? And that's the thing that a lot of people also don't know is that you have to have a tax liability in order to get the full tax credit. And if you don't have, if you don't, if you're not in the right income bracket and you're in the lower or moderate income, you're not gonna get the full 30%. You might only get 10% of the tax credit because of your tax liability. So you you had these deals where they were sold on the 30% that they had to bring it in, but they only got 10%. And then they wouldn't roll that in and their payments would go up and they would be underwater for solar. You were spending more than you were getting from benefit. And this became really how solar had been financed over the last 10 years. And we said, as a bank, we're a regulated institution. We have to have the utmost consumer protections possible. And we need to make sure that we are offering an ethical product because over the long run, we can't have these fees that ultimately are inflating the cost of solar and and mitigating the drop in cost to make it more affordable, right? The fat in solar is has been really customer acquisition, marketing, and finance. It's really, it's over 50% of a solar array. People are paying for that stuff. It's not even the hardware, it's the soft cost, we call it. Soft, right? So we came in and said if we could use FDIC insured deposits, we don't have to charge the dealer fee because I don't have a cost of capital at six or seven percent. I actually have it at 3.5%, right? And and so therefore, I don't have to charge a fee in order to make my net, you know, my net interest margin, my overall return that I'm looking at. And also uh as a bank, we're able to amortize the loans much further than fintechs or even CDFIs or credit unions. They only can max at 20 years. Guess what? Our loan is 30 years. So the second you start creating a mortgage-style product where somebody can get 100% financing, amortize it over the 30 years like a mortgage, and simply pay monthly fixed over the term. Now you're talking about a solution that doesn't rely on the government tax credit, that is fully transparent to the customer. If they want a cash deal or they want a finance deal, it'll be the same price, right? And they can reap all of the financial benefits. They could take the cash credit and pocket it. They could take the cash credit and roll it into the loan and will drop your payments, but never will your payment ever go up a penny from the day you sign with the Climate First Bank Loan. And that's the fundamental difference, right? We flipped it on its head. You normally had to pay low and go high, and now you start low and can go lower. And that became, at first, I'll tell you, it wasn't popular to have this product because the competitors, the mosaics, were selling a customer at a 3.99% interest, right? Versus my 7%. Now it's 8% fixed interest. But they didn't realize that the whole system was 30% more. So although it was a 3.99%, I spent way more up front. And that's that's how we've been able to kind of turn the thing around. So in a world without tax credits, we will definitely see a shrinking of the market. Wood Mackenzie, one of the you know biggest forecasters, has has mentioned that we'll probably see a 20 to 40% drop in residential solar in the country, which is substantial. That's loss of businesses. That is definitely an erosion of the progress we've been making. Um, but I do think that we're gonna see eventually a tick backup later this year into 2027, and we're gonna continue to see solar be a viable financial investment for homeowners because as you see, the rise in electric rates are only going up quicker and more aggressive than we've seen historically. And so it's only helping solar pencil better. Uh, and so we feel that if we continue to come out with this ethical product, mortgage-style loan, that we'll continue to gain market share and build out, you know, our solution, you know, for the country.

SPEAKER_01 59:46

And it feels like to me, and I don't have any data to back this up, maybe, maybe you've seen something, but it feels to me like there's a growing momentum to pair the batteries with the solar systems, and that there's there's definitely a market appeal out there to to look at that more complete system, that more independent style system um for people. Are you seeing that through the bank too?

SPEAKER_02 1:00:11

We are. We're seeing a real uptick in the percentage of loans that are coupling solar and storage. And the cool thing about our loan is it it allows you to roll in the battery and the solar and a new roofs, as well as enabling electrical upgrades into one loan. So you're able to bundle these different improvements into one loan, one piece of paper, and be able to stretch that over the 30 years at a fixed interest. And oh, by the way, no dealer fee, but there's also no prepayment penalty. And that's a really interesting thing. Most solar, when it's financed, is paid off between five and seven years. Historically, the last 20 years of solar paper, people might get a 20-year loan, but what happens is they refinance their house or they sell their house within the five to seven year period is on average, and they basically have to pay that solar loan off. So, what we decided to do is our collateral for the loan is a UCC one filing on the equipment. It's a specific type of way to cloud the title of and basically have collateral. So if somebody defaults on that, technically we could pull the panels off of the roof if we wanted. Right. And um the beauty about it is for our loan, if you decide to refinance in the second year, there's no penalty to do that, to prepay. So no prepayment penalties on the loan. Um, and so the goal is stretch it 30 years to financially engineer the product so that the payment per month is as close to a utility bill replacement as possible. And if you can get somebody to literally replace what they're normally paying for solar, you're gonna go hand over fist, it's gonna go forward, right? And you're gonna start seeing the financial benefits from it. And that's why we have virtually zero defaults and over 8,800 households. We have financed to date in the last few years, over $450 million worth of solar across 45 states, and thus far have virtually a default of zero percent. Because why would you default on a loan when I'm gonna spend more on my power bill that's only gone up year over year? Right?

SPEAKER_01 1:02:16

Yeah. No, that's that's a great, that's a great initial track record, and I hope that it continues that way, and I can see where it would. Um, but uh that's that's phenomenal to be able to report that so far.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:28

Uh so I've felt, and I've joked with you about this before. I I've felt that whenever we talk, I'm talking to a future president of the United States. And and that might sound preposterous, but your track record of forming local and international groups that accomplish so much is incredible. And these things are happening regardless of political affiliation, as we talked about before. So the question is given your exposure to the executive branch, are you ever considering running for office someday?

SPEAKER_02 1:03:05

Oh man, Mike, what a question. I will say it's not out of the or it's not off the table. And you know, I still think I have a lot to do. Um, but naturally, I feel that um I do feel that there's a role for me to support our community in a in a different way. And um when, I'm not sure, but I am open to the right opportunity to be able to lead, um, whether it's at a local level. I'm a really big fan of what Mayor Dyer has done. And he's inspired me to actually, if I would look at low, you know, elected uh leadership, it would be something like a mayor of a city. Um, because of what he was able to do, how how bipartisan he was in his leadership and the ability of really seeing progress on the ground when you're in that role. It's it's it's it's it's very much the closest that you can get to influencing your community at a scale that is meaningful. And um, and so it's it's not off the table, Mike, but certainly not in in the current cards or you know, uh, you know, something that I'm I'm striving towards per se. And to be honest, a lot of this stuff has has has just has just come my way, right? Like as I was talking about, I was head down with ideas for us and citizen energy. I was trying to retrofit buildings, and all of a sudden I get this email from the city, like, hey, there's this opportunity, and I joined the city and I fall in love with local government and doing that work. And then I'm head down and all of a sudden I get this other, I have no idea. And I can go to the federal government. And so all that is I keep thinking back to, you know, taking advice from a river and and and going with what comes at me. And of course, I'm manifesting that with my work and what I'm doing and the connections I'm making. But those connections are are creating uh a complexity that is that is is is opening up doors um that I would have never imagined. And so I can't take that off the table because one day there might be an opening that really, you know, calls me to act and calls me to serve in a way that I um that I can't deny. Right. And um, so I'm open to it.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:17

And and and what you hit on, uh I've heard uh Pete Budig talk about before about how you know when you're in the mayoral position, you know, it really you have to look at it all and you have to be able to deal with everyone. And it does suit you to a higher level of office, but it's he he was talking about it from both that perspective and the perspective of you know, it's it's really important and you're really working with the people every day. And you know, there's a lot of people.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:47

No matter if they like you or not, what you know, what you know color or creed or belief that they have. You're right. It's it's on the ground, it's and it's it's the real work of of supporting you know the next generation. Education and opportunity, it's economic development and growth. It's you know, it's really fostering a resilient and thriving community. And there's so many pieces that create you know that require um to get there. And so I I do think that local government is just something I I really enjoyed what I was doing in Orlando. And um I think that that is a space for those who are looking at you know where you might be able to make an impact. Don't don't leave government off the table. Considering everything that's going on, I do know that there might be some some concern in that space. But that is one of the most fulfilling things that that I have ever done and probably will ever do, was being in that city.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:39

Well, and you know, there there's a certain magic when, you know, like you mentioned, you you're just doing what you're doing, and people knock on your door to say, hey, well, will you consider this, will you consider that? In my opinion, that's that's the kind of leader that I think is is needed because I think of it as the reluctant leader. It's the person who is like, hey, I'm just I'm just doing good things, and other people are going, yeah, but you need to do more, you need to be able to do more, and I know that you can accomplish more if you were to be this or that leader, regardless of whether it's elected or not. Sure, totally. Um, but that that concept of the reluctant leader to me, just it feels so good because it's not someone saying, Oh, I don't know, look at me, only I'm the only one who can do this.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:34

And uh like you're here today and very perspective, yes, no, agree. It's like coming from a genuine place of wanting to serve and wanting to really make the biggest positive impact you could possibly make on on a regular basis. And um, yeah, no, that's funny. You're not the first person who has asked me. I get it often. I get a lot of people urging me to consider it because I think to your point, they think if I can get into that position, that I could actually uh break down a lot of barriers that have that have persisted, you know, and um can really make some some change. So I'm open to it.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:11

And I'll make the joke that now you're finally old enough to run for president.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:15

So you can do it. I just breached over that that minimum threshold. That's right. That's right. True.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:25

Um you mentioned next generation. And and and this is kind of where I want to wrap up our conversation. You're still young, but you've accomplished a lot. What advice would you give to the kid who's listening or or watching to this and saying, you know, I'm inspired. I I want to follow this path.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:48

Well, listen, I'm a I'm a proud dad as well. We get one thing, and we haven't talked about it a little bit more on the personal side, but I have a daughter, two daughters, three and eight year years old. And of course, I'm I'm starting to, and I have been looking, you know, through life through their lens and um trying to figure out how to make sure that by the time they're my age, they have so much more than I have, and and the opportunities continue to be endless. And um, and so as I think, you know, about their future and and those who are really trying to get in this space, I encourage them to stay curious. I think first and foremost, this curiosity about the world is what allows me to continue driving forward and being open to new opportunities. When I was at UCF and trying to figure out where within the sustainability world I wanted to lean into, because of course there's so much under that sun, I started doing a whole bunch of different experiential learning opportunities. I did uh we did Gulf or tortoise surveying in our natural lands uh and was understanding keystone species. I did an urban heat island study with a bunch of data loggers and looking at how do we mitigate, you know, with resilience some of the heat islands that we're seeing. Um I got to go to the US Department of Energy and look uh as an intern and look at the federal landscape of policy making and grant making and how that spurred this partnership of federalism all the way down to my backyard, right, to move the needle. Um and I think that my biggest strength in any role that I have been in has been the diversity of experience and the diversity of learnings that I've had because of this curiosity engine that I have in me, right? Being able to stay curious. And I still remember when I started getting really excited about clean energy, um I stumbled on algae as a biofuel. And there was a lot of research that was going into this concept of algal biofuel, or how do we how do we mitigate point source emissions like coal plants and mining factories and grow the next generation of biofuels? And I remember like for months staying up into the Wii hours and doing my own research and getting so engaged, I ended up getting an internship because of that work at DOE because of an undergraduate dissertation on algae biofuels. It's called Carbon Capture and Grow. And so it just this uh I think it's important to do that. I think it's important to stay curious, to uh find experiential learning opportunities to apply what you're learning and and often do so outside of your you know uh comfort zone, so to speak, and um, and then continue to pursue uh, you know, a continued love of for learning and pursuit of knowledge, right? Um, you know, you you'll end your degree uh if you're if you're if you're a student, um, and I continue to pursue additional certifications. I just finished a course on regenerative economics, which I'm pretty excited about. Um, of course, I'm a lead accredited professional. I've gone through a smart cities uh professional certification. Um, but these are different ways in which you continue to round yourself out. And um I would just encourage you to find those that align with your passion. Um, get find an organization that you feel uh you could build your network around, like an ideas for us, or a local USGBC chapter, and um and just stay curious.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:16

Well, if Mexico can elect a climate scientist as president, maybe we can do it in the United States too. So indeed you're an example for many to emulate, Chris. Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:30

Thank you, Mike. It's my pleasure.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:32

Stay tuned for more episodes of the Impact Series Podcast on the Green Builder Media Network. I'm Mike Kalignan, and I'll see you again soon.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:39

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