Finding Success in the 21st Century

There used to be a ladder to success. It was the college→good job→marriage→house→family→cushy retirement. Sure, not everyone made it, there were a few broken rungs near the bottom but that was the guiding light to the good life and enough people made it that it seemed within reach. A few people questioned this ladder as really being “the good life” but those were just hippies or crazies, no one worth paying attention to. Now all this has changed; my generation is growing up without a ladder.

Before you scoff, let’s think about that for a second. The first rung on the ladder, college, used to be seen as a straight shot to success. Now, for too many of us, it’s a straight shot to our parent’s couch and thousands of dollars in student loans, totaling over $1 trillion annually. As for a “good job,” well, many of us are busing tables in restaurants and shuffling papers in unpaid internships, but we’re the lucky ones. For those who didn’t make it to college, the unemployment rate is more than doubled at 8.7 percent, leading to a total of 14 percent of young workers (20-24) who are unemployed. While the economy will certainly improve, those years spent doing menial labor will never come back to us, with estimates that we could end up earning 10 percent less on average than somebody who left school a few years before or after the recession due to the loss of critical entry-level work experience.

As Derek Thompson of the Altantic put it, “For Millennials, this is the great irony of the Great Recession. A crisis that started in the housing market could wind up having the most lasting negative impact on the one generation that didn’t own any homes before the bust.”

Marriage is in decline with many young people choosing to wait or simply throwing marriage out as an outdated concept and opting for cohabitation or other “new family forms” instead. The idea that all of us should strive to own a home is what brought our economy to it’s knees so we’re lowering our expectations on that one a bit.  As for retirement, don’t think we don’t know that social security is just a big ponzi scheme–one that’s expected to run out in 2037, well before most of us retire.

Now that our ladder has been reduced to splinters, the question remains: what does “success” mean in the 21st century and how do we achieve it?

We know how we don’t achieve it. We know that decades of runaway capitalism with ever more desperate attempts to improve the bottom line and lobby for more deregulation have failed. We know that measuring our country merely by GDP has put us 25th on the “inequality-adjusted” Human Development Index–meaning that there’s a good reason why the 99% took to America’s streets.

So if we’re not measuring America’s success by GDP, what should we measure? Recently, economists and national leaders have begun pushing for a something radically simple: measure success by happiness. Of course, measuring something as complex as happiness isn’t easy but as the recent Harvard Business Review issue devoted to the topic will tell you, not only is measuring happiness possible, valuing it can greatly increase company profits.

Success for my generation will be a shift from business as usual to something Umair Haque calls “Betterness.” A transition from climbing the ladder of unfulfilling societal expectations and consumerism to blazing a trail with a life guided by a holistic focus on well-being, community and sustainability. Following a better path won’t be easy but as we lie dreaming under the glow-in-the-dark stars of our childhood room we know that it’s at least one dream worth fighting for.

The Future We Want to Live

When I was just beginning kindergarten, the leaders of the world came together in Rio de Janeiro for a groundbreaking Earth Summit that put the concept of sustainable development and biological diversity on the global political agenda. While I was chopping the hair off my sister’s Barbies in third grade, the United States whacked the teeth out of the world’s first agreement on climate change by refusing to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. When America gave me the license to drink, I flew to Copenhagen and watched world negotiators water down the Copenhagen climate treaty till it was virtually worthless–effectively drowning out the cries of hope and change from our U.S. youth delegation and close to 100,000 other civil society members. Twenty years after the first Earth Summit, the leaders of the world are coming together for Rio+20 under the slogan of “the future we want.”

For the majority of my life and the lives of my peers, our leaders have worked hard to give us a future we don’t want. Global energy needs are skyrocketing and the climate is heating up fast–with normally conservative institutions like the OECD, the IEA and McKinsey predicting dire consequences from our carbon emissions and explosive population growth.

Twenty years after sustainable development was first put on the agenda the world’s youth are planning to call this meeting to order. After all, for us, this isn’t merely about “the future we want,” it’s about the future we will live.

So what type of future do we want to live? Well, world, we’ve already begun showing you. We’ve tweeted and facebooked our way into an Arab Spring that has succeeded in removing dictators. We’ve #occupied cities across the world, calling for the global elite to pay their fair share. Now we’re taking on a new type of tyranny, the tyranny of an energy system and a concept of development that has enriched a handful of fossil fuel companies and corrupt leaders at the expense of the 99% and our planet.

Fossil fuel-based development is proving to be anything but sustainable. As Carl Pope recently wrote,

“There is not enough cheap oil or coal in the world to elevate the lives of the world’s four billion poor; trying to do so will kill millions, mostly the poor, with soot, smog, and heavy metals; and will bankrupt the treasuries of nations like China, India and America that face trade deficits for the deadly carbon duo, coal and oil.”

We need to rapidly transition to clean energy but more than that, we need to put our world on the path to sustainable development. Sustainable development encompasses a wide range of practices but as our U.S. youth delegation is urging world leaders at Rio+20 to define it, “sustainability” must convey underpinning ecological, social, cultural, and economic principles. We want world leaders to think of development in the sense of creating a “green economy,” one that prioritizes the well-being and basic needs of people and recognizes that infinite material growth is impossible in a finite world. A green economy must minimize ecosystem degradation and move beyond GDP as the sole indicator of prosperity.

Our demands are great but our need is even greater. Watch out world, we’re no longer toddlers gurgling bathwater and we’re tired of the way you’ve been playing with our future.

The Moments that Made 2011

On January 1st 2011 I found myself in a circle of women at a polygamous wedding, chatting feminism with the first wife as the new young bride entered the household covered in intricate henna designs. On January 26th, one day after my birthday, I stood alone at the famous Casablanca mosque, hiding my bright Nigerien clothing under a newly purchased peacoat and wondering what I was ever going to do with myself now that Peace Corps had abruptly ended. On January 31st I was in India, interviewing for a dream internship at an angel investment firm for social entrepreneurs and wondering how I was ever going to tell my parents that I wasn’t coming home. I’m not a jetsetter, my months don’t usually look like this, but 2011 taught me that you never really know what life is going to throw at you.

Attending an Indian wedding was enough to make anyone want to live there but I knew I needed to figure out if I could handle the India that exists outside the gates of the dazzling saris and Bollywood songs. So I took a train ride, by myself, in the lowest class, standing for hours, pressed against on all sides by skinny Indian men. I loved it and so when my parents left New Delhi I waved and jumped into the suffocating arms of a 17 million person city. I was quickly pulled up by the gentle hands of a few fellow Udall Scholars, two amazing Indian coworkers and an incredible Columbian housemate who showed me the wonders among the chaos. Having friends in a foreign country was enough in itself but having friends who were as excited as I was about going on adventures was paradise. My weeknights were often filled with Indian cooking experiments, surrounded by friends who knew as little about aloo gobi as I did. My weekends were spent on buses and trains, traveling to far flung temples and beautiful hill stations.

Holi, the Hindu festival of colors, found me covered in paint, shooting a squirt gun full of liquid paint out of an auto rickshaw. We were promptly shot back at by grinning Indian men from another rickshaw. I chased after an elephant on my way to work, only to joyfully haggle with the owner and try and get him to give me a ride for a non-tourist price. India beat Pakistan in Cricket and we all danced drunkenly in the streets, only to dance even harder the next week when India won the Cricket World Cup. I visited a few incredible women taxi drivers at their homes in the slums and was overjoyed when I was able to bring attention to their work by getting an article published in Forbes. I woke up early to see Delhi’s flower market, a full city block filled with beautiful flowers, soon to decorate the homes of India’s growing middle class. I traveled to a rural village and found that “rural village” means something very different in booming economy of India than it does in the sleepy villages of Niger. I interviewed countless women entrepreneurs, many who had braved domestic abuse to start their businesses, and wrote case studies for them to help get more funding. My friends helped wrap me in a saree and I got on a plane headed home after four incredible months.

Despite my best intentions, I teared up at the “Welcome to America” video on my flight. I visited Whitman’s graduation and relived the feeling of knowing everyone around me. I spent a few weeks funemployed, catching up with friends and even unexpectedly performing a comedy skit about Niger when I was forced onstage. My mom convinced me to join her on a half marathon and then another, close enough together we pretend that we ran a full one. I learned the joys of sloshball (drunk kickball) at my sister’s graduation and then started an all-consuming job as a program leader at a youth leadership/entrepreneurship program. I learned more about the heartbreaking racial and socioeconomic divisions in America than I could have ever imagined working in Oakland only 10 minutes from my fancy suburban home.

Social enterprises began to take over my life in a delicious way: Two of my good friends and I started a company to combat malnutrition in Niger through moringa oleifera, a superfood that grows there, and though we’re still very much in the R&D phase, we love what we’re doing. After Summer of Solutions ended, I found a job doing communications/marketing for Solar Mosaic, a company I love, and I finally found myself a real mentor. I started riding my bike 15 miles to work each day and found myself rewarded with a feeling of athleticism but without a stolen bike and Iphone.

My moments are turning into memories and my blog post into a memoir so I must stop. 2012 is upon us and who knows what adventures the new year will bring!

Looking Back on 2010

I know what you’re thinking. It’s 2012 now, shouldn’t she be looking back on 2011? Well, I was and then I came across a blog post that I wrote last year on January 1st 2011 but due to the minor complication of a terrorist attack that forced me to evacuate my life, never published. So here we go:

A bat entered my bedroom at exactly midnight, its small wings and high-pitched chirps seemed to be God’s way of telling me to wake up and greet the New Year. Blearily,  I reached for my phone  and stared at the greenish 00:00 01.01.2011 that cut through the darkness. Outside my house all was quiet, it was a far cry from the debauchery that has marked most of the new year’s eves that I can remember. According to the Islamic calendar the New Year falls on December 7, a day long past.  But even then, there hadn’t been much to give the new year a proper welcoming; the only reason I even knew there was a holiday was because we were given the day off school.

So there I lay under my mosquito net, alone in my little mud house since the bat had decided to find somewhere more exciting to carry out the New Year’s festivities. My mind began to wander, rewinding to midnight on January 2010, when I’d stood with my sister on top of a tall apartment building in Amsterdam, watching fireworks explode all around us and drunken Europeans below us stumble from one nightclub to another. She had been studying abroad in England and I’d been in Copenhagen for a conference on climate change. We’d decided to meet up and hostel hop, a very cold but exciting adventure.

Then there was the last semester of senior year, a strange mixture of incredible stress, tearful farewells and a lot of partying. I distinctly remember meeting with my senior thesis group at the Walla Walla Brew Pub, downing beers with our professor as we discussed the impending deadlines of the honors thesis. The library seemed to be my second home what with my thesis, fellowship applications and the normal, never-ending stream of homework. And yet, in between all the studying were potlucks, slam poetry nights, wine tasting and those awesome Whitman parties where everyone knows each other. Sadly, there was the inevitable break-up with my long-time college boyfriend but there were also the amazing friends who brought me chocolate and hugged me as I cried. I won a journalism prize of $500 and used the money to go on an “alternative” spring break trip down to New Orleans to build houses, discovering my love of power-tools and eating deep fried oreos for the first—and probably last—time. I gave an undergraduate presentation about my thesis and felt honored that three of my politics professor came to watch me speak. Then my introductory geology professor took me down a few notches, giving me the worst exam grade of my college career.

There was a lot of community service, weekends spent distributing energy-efficient light-bulbs in poor, mostly Latino, neighborhoods. And endless hours spent organizing events, like the Earth Day celebration that rocked Whitman for a whole week. Of course, there relaxing times too, like those picnics in the wheat fields, evenings spent lying on blankets and slowly watching the sun turn the golden wheat a brilliant orange.

I had the distinct honor of not only giving the baccalaureate speech at my graduation but also having twenty members of my family make the long drive up from the San Francisco Bay Area to celebrate with me. After graduating I had a little more than a month to try to see all the people I love before taking off for two years in Niger.  June was filled with coffee dates, lunches, long walks and then an amazing graduation present trip to Italy. I definitely spent a lot of money before moving to the poorest country in the world…Then there was that fateful day at the airport, hugging all of my sisters and almost breaking down at the sight of my dad tearing up, but somehow walking through that security line and coming to Niger.

July, August and September were spent in a summer-camp like flurry of language classes, volleyball games, runs through the millet fields and lots of bonding with my host family and fellow Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs). There was “demystification,” a night spent with a Peace Corps Volunteer to discover what the life of a PCV was really like. After that, I found out my village placement of Safo and was lucky enough to get to visit it before anyone else had seen their villages, spending two weeks living in my new house with three other PCVs and a language tutor to try and immerse ourselves in Hausa. Our language immersion group made up a song in Hausa to the tune of Madonna’s Holiday and ended up winning an oreo cream pie for our efforts. Then I had to say another goodbye, tearing up as my host mother cried and giving long hugs to all the amazing friends I’d made during Pre-Service Training.

On September 29^th I arrived in Safo and began my new life in a small Nigerien village only to have it shattered with the news that Stephanie Chance, a fellow PCV and friend who had spent language immersion with me in Safo, had unexpectedly passed away in her sleep. Along with the rest of my training group, I immediately left my village and headed for Niamey, the capitol city, where a funeral service was to be held. It was hard, so hard to say goodbye, but amazing to see how our group banded together and comforted each other. After a few days of mourning and counseling sessions, we went back to our villages and re-started our lives.

I started to turn my house into a home, making myself a mud oven, planting a garden and decorating my mud walls with postcards from home. My days began to have a rhythm, a schedule of alternating between teaching English at the middle school, helping out at the health center and chatting with the men at the mayor’s office. Before I knew it, it was Halloween and time to go to the nearby Peace Corps hostel to cook delicious food, dress up in crazy costumes and dance the night away. Another month passed in a whirl of work, dinner parties, teaching my favorite little girls how to count to ten and building lots of improved cookstoves. Thanksgiving at the hostel probably involved even more gluttony than usual, given my inability to buy many vegetables or fruit in my village. I painted a few maps of Niger and one of Africa on my primary school’s walls and then made a small tree farm at my middle school. Then it was Christmas and we decorated our hostel as best we could and played carols to help bring the spirit of Christmas to a country where no one actually celebrates it.

Now it’s 2011 and there are children banging at my door so I’d best go answer and find out what the new year will bring!

The End of Start Up Summer

After researching start-ups for three months in India, I was keen to work on my own start up once I returned back to America. One might say, overly keen, since I ended up being involved with 5 start-ups over the course of the summer.

At first it was just Summer of Solutions, an intensive three month program that brought together young adults from across the country to work on creating sustainable solutions to some of the challenges in Oakland. While it was certainly a transformative experience and incredibly eye-opening to the atrocities occurring in my own backyard, we weren’t grounded enough in the community–in terms of both partners and participants–to really have a sustained impact.

Through my position as the leader of Summer of Solution’s Energy Track I became involved in two more programs: an energy efficiency program and Solar Moasic. The energy efficiency program came out of the idea that while there are many organizations that work on energy efficiency, there are very few that provide comprehensive energy audits (complete with a blower door test) to lower-income residents. One of our solutionaries, Kimberely, had experience in conducting energy audits so she attempted to teach us with the idea that we could start a business around it. I say “attempted” because even though she did a great job, conducting a full-scale energy audit requires a lot of expertise and practice! At the same time that I was working on the energy efficiency program, I was also working at Solar Mosaic, an innovative solar finance start-up  that connects people who want to invest in solar with community centers who can benefit from it. It’s best explained through this video. I loved my work there and have had the privilege to continue it as a “fellow” (read: wayy underpaid & overworked) at Solar Mosaic.

At the same time that I was getting more involved locally, I still had dreams to return to Niger and try to repay some of the extraordinary kindness I received while I was there. Some of you may remember back in April when I posted about an idea I had of how I wanted to go back to Niger and use Moringa Oleifera–an indigenous superfood–to empower Nigerien woman and combat malnutrition. Well, that idea prompted me to meet a former Peace Corps Volunteer named Brett who had started a bean-to-bar chocolate company in Madagascar called Madecasse. He and I made a deal that I would help him research chocolate competitors if he would advise me on how to start a company in Niger that produces nutritional Moringa bars. This exchange ended up involving a lot of standing in the chocolate section of Whole Foods but it also gave me the confidence I needed to recruit a few friends into turning my Niger idea into reality.

So now the summer is ending and I’ve begun to whittle down my ridiculous list of start-ups into two: Solar Mosaic (my day job) and Kuli Kuli (my passionate project to return to Niger).  My life lately has been a bit of a wild ride but I wouldn’t have missed it for all the “normal” 9-5 jobs in the world!

Renewable Energy! > Nuclear

In the aftermath of the Japanese disaster, politicians around the globe have been debating the necessity of including nuclear as part of the transition to a clean energy future. Unlike other leaders who have placed moratoriums on the licensing of new plants, American politicians have largely stuck by nuclear–a consensus that perhaps was aided by storm of nuclear lobbyists on Capitol Hill.

But, as of last month, the U.S. renewable energy industry has reached an important milestone: domestic production is now greater than that of nuclear power.

This milestone has been reached by important leaps in the renewable sector, particularly from solar-generated electricity which increased by 104.8 percent in the first three months of 2011 compared to the first quarter of 2010.

While renewable energy still has a long way to go before it catches up to fossil fuels, the recent jump in production could play a major role in a nuclear debate that has often denounced the ability of renewable energy to provide stable and sufficient power. While most people agree that nuclear carries inherent meltdown risks and poses the serious challenge of radioactive waste storage, support for nuclear power was at an all-time high among the American public before the disaster in Japan.

Last February, the World Wildlife Fund released a provocative energy report  of an future world run entirely by renewable energy, set in 2050. The report was quickly followed by two papers from professors at Stanford and UC Davis envisioning a similar future but one solely reliant on already existing renewables, mainly solar and wind.

The tide is clearly changing with more academics, politicians and activists agreeing that renewable energy is the way of the future. Whereas nuclear power plants go for at least $10 billion a pop, here at Solar Mosaic we’re building community solar projects with investments as small as $100. I know where I’m putting my money…

Cross-posted at the Solar Mosaic blog http://solarmosaic.com/blog/renewable-energy-nuclear

One Year Ago Today

One year ago today I got on a plane headed into what I thought would be misery. Google was full of flashing words like famine, and absolute poverty that conjured up images of those stick-armed children with bellies full of malnutrition and flies buzzing around small tears eking out encrusted eyes. Little did I know that the only misery I would feel in Niger during my seven months would be when I was forced to leave.

It’s the moments that I will take with me: The time when I taught kickboxing to the little girls that loved to hang around my house and they went off into the streets, kicking so high that their hijabs flew like kites above their small bodies. The day when both of my sandals broke at once and, seeing my hesitation to walk barefoot, a man I’d never met gave me the shoes off his feet so that I could walk back home and get a different pair. Sitting around the small charcoal stove drinking chai with a group of guy friends proudly explaining to them how I fully intended to have four husbands just as they all wished for four wives. Teaching English to a packed classroom made of millet, without desks or books and yet the children still came back every morning, eager to see what the crazy white girl would do next.

Then, without time to fully comprehend that the life I’d come to love was truly ending, I was catapulted to Morocco where I’m sure I saw many amazing sights over the two weeks but somehow all I remember was the damp side of a pillow and concealer attempts that could never make-up my loss.

The third plane ride ended in India, in an airport in New Delhi where I patiently waited for family friends I’d never met to show me a slice of life I’d never dreamed I would have the good fortune to enjoy: a spectacular five-day Indian wedding. My parents joined me and I realized how different we’d become–they were appalled by India’s poverty, I was shocked by the lavishness. Deciding to leave my fate up to fate, I took a train ride in the lowest class and despite getting on the wrong train and standing for three hours pressed up against various strange men, the sun setting over the temples we passed and the woman on the train who, without speaking English, managed to both find me a seat and get me to my proper destination, convinced me that I should stay in this crazy country.

Thus began my transition from a country of 16 million to a city of 17 million. From a life of few vegetables to street vendors who yelled the Hindi names of their carts full of produce as they passed by my window. From no electricity to a desk job completely dependent upon it. Late nights at the office ending with greasy, but oh-so-delicious street food. New words like “social enterprise” that revealed their power when I interviewed women entrepreneurs who had gone from being beaten by their husbands to having their husbands work for them: the true power of money.

I came home only to discover that a mere 10 minutes from my house resided a world of incredible people doing everything they can to change the Oakland stereotypes of drugs, prostitution and violence. I came together with 30 other young people and discovered that we really can be the change we want to see, whether it takes the form of neighborhood gardens, community solar, a free summer camp or slam poetry.

A year ago I set out to find my purpose, to figure out where I could be the most useful. I’m still not sure quite what I’ve found–this year has been an exotic jewel of which I have yet to figure out the value. But I feel blessed to have enjoyed it and hope only that next year will be half as exciting.

Celebrating Dependence

Despite all of the fireworks, BBQs and parades to the contrary,  this weekend I want to celebrate dependence. The America that existed on July 4, 1776 when our founding fathers declared independence from Great Britain is a far cry from the interconnected and interdependent society in which we currently reside.

We know from the abundance of Chinese animé in Chicago, Bollywood movie theaters in California and Mexican soap operas in Kansas that our country is culturally connected to the rest of the world. The economic crisis that began in 2008 taught us that risky  mortgage-backed securities and speculative real estate bubbles could have lasting repercussions from Iceland to Indiana. The rise of social media technologies such as Facebook and Skype have connected us to people across the world in ways we never had imagined possible. Even rural villages without electricity are rapidly becoming connected through the dissemination of mobile phones and solar technologies to power them. New companies like ZipCar and Netflicks have taught us that when we connect and share resources with other people, we can lower the price and increase the value for everyone involved.

Our cultural, economic, technological and material connections are easily recognizable and often celebrated. But what about our climatic connections? It’s no longer debatable that our world is getting warmer and that our reliance on fossil fuels is largely responsible.  As Americans, we take a lion’s share of that responsibility since we comprise less than 5% of the global population but 25% of the world’s ghg emissions.

So, in this interconnected world where we can Skype a friend in rural Niger who is watching children around him die of malnutrition since the rains once again failed to come, what do we do?

Well, a lot of things. One thing that I’m particularly excited about is the prospect of working together with my community to collectively fund solar projects on community centers or places of worship. I’ve recently started working with Solar Mosaic, a marketplace that anyone can use to create solar projects and finance them from their communities, locally and online. Whereas independent attempts to go solar are often only accessible to the wealthy and within that demographic, only those with the proper space for the project, Solar Mosaic is democratizing clean energy development by recognizing that just as the electricity grid connects different energy types, we can connect different people in order to make a thriving and sustainable future truly possible.

How about a round of cheers for dependence day?

Getting Burned

The tops of my thighs, the small of my back and the beginning of my chest are on fire. Somehow the afternoon spent outside next to a beautiful California palm tree in group discussions about race, community organizing and fundraising have burned me in a way nothing else this year has.

Strangely, the seven months I spent living in one of the hottest and poorest countries in the world left me largely unblemished. I managed to keep my pale skin safe from the Nigerien sun, hiding it under the long skirts, headscarves and the shelter of being a foreigner in a land so very different from my own. Though the poverty radiated, it was always screened through a layer of cultural differences, hospitality and the pride that kept my village friends from ever admitting that they were hungry. The one time reality managed to beam through my protections–when the skinniest child I’d ever seen walked up to me and immediately collapsed from malnourishment–my friends quickly assured me that the child had merely lost his family and that was the reason for his chicken-thin arms.

Though I migrated directly from almost absolute poverty in small mud hut with no electricity to a nice shady apartment in a relatively wealthy city, India still turned me pink. The slums that surrounded the richer neighborhoods–tin shack settlements “necessary” to house the servants who spent their days catering to the every need of the rich–made my blood boil every time I passed them. The street children who constantly grabbed at my arms every time I walked out of the metro made my face turn red with shame that I couldn’t support them without supporting the beggar mofia bosses who often cut off the children’s limbs to make them appear more pitiful. Instead, I drowned out the beggar’s cries with Bollywood music and let the brightly colored sarees blind me from the stark inequalities that characterize the country.

Though the struggles I saw in both Niger and India have profoundly affected me, it is these past five days of Summer of Solutions orientation week that have made my heart burn. The anti-oppression trainings, intense discussions and presentations have all made me think, but the simple off-hand comments are what has really gotten under my skin:

“I like Alameda, I just don’t like going there cause the cops always follow me for DWB.” It took me a minute to register that simply because my friend is black, he is consistently followed by the cops every time he comes to my neighborhood for “Driving While Black.

“While sure, its alright during the day but don’t walk there at night or you might get taken for a prostitute.” Another friend responding to my comment that the street near the Fruitvale BART station seemed like it wasn’t so bad as everyone always made it out to be.

“The cops are forever stopping and searching my friends and I just for hanging out on the streets. Sometimes they even hit us with the back of their pistols. I got tired of it and started carrying around a CopWatch “Know Your Rights”  booklet. One cop took it and tore it up, telling me ‘it didn’t scare him.’” I knew that the Oakland cops were rough but I never knew just how horrible they could be.

Among other things, these comments have made me realize the extent to which I have largely ignored the daily struggles taking place less than 10 minutes from my house. While I still care a great amount about international work and doing my best to continue to be useful to people in Niger and India, I’m quickly finding that the problems taking place in my own backyard are what is really makes my skin burn.

My 40 New Best Friends

Five days ago I remember sitting nervously around a bowl of cherries at a fellow program leader’s kitchen table. Our conversation kept switching with the tense energy of those with much to say but too many thoughts to clearly express any of them. Have we figured out housing for everyone? How much money do we still need to fundraise? What time are we going to start tomorrow? Have you emailed the group the address yet?

Now I look around at a sea of young faces, all different races, different backgrounds and with different reasons why we decided to spend our summer working to create ingenuitive grassroots solutions to Oakland’s most challenging environmental and social problems. Despite our differences, I can confindently say that there is not a single person in the room who I wouldn’t feel comfortable talking to and confiding in. Moreover, there are many people in the room whom I’ve told more personal things about myself than I have to friends I’ve known for years.

This story of immediate friendship might be written off as “cute” just as Summer of Solutions is often written off as just another “summer camp.” But in many ways, I believe that the community we are creating is a model for how the rest of the world should function. Imagine if diverse groups of people, from all different income levels and racial backgrounds, came together to really think about the problems that their community was facing and then worked together to solve those problems? Sound idealistic? Maybe, but if you truly believe as I do that at some point all of these smiling faces sitting around me are going to take the knowledge that they’ve learned this summer to become even better leaders in their communities and country then perhaps a solutionary world isn’t that far off in the future.