About CTLR’s #HumansOfCleantech

Modeled after the New York Times' Humans of New York series, this is an idea by Peter Kelley and the RenewComm team for us to showcase our members!

Follow #humansofcleantech on LinkedIn for more in this series. #climatetech #energytransition #cleantechleadersroundtable 

I WAS A TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE JAZZ SINGER.

I knew that career path would probably end when I hit 25, and an architect’s career path would probably peak at age 55. So I thought, I better become an architect.

I was very lucky to have been born into a loving family that valued family life and education. My father was an industrialist and my mother was a stay at home mom, but she was entrepreneurial. She volunteered for political campaigns, hospitals, and libraries, and she was on every board on earth.

When I was seven, she started organizing campaigns for John Chafee, who won the race for governor. He appointed my mother to the Rhode Island Board of Regents, and soon after she worked her way up to being the chairman. Then, she ran for office. She became a state senator, and she was the only female in the State Senate.

My father and grandfather started a family business, the Carol Cable Wire Company, which made wire for the automotive industry. Everything was being electrified in the 1940s. At age 42, he decided he no longer wanted to work at a desk in a factory, so he sold his company and went back to graduate school. He became a professor, and he started wearing corduroy jackets with little leather patches and smoking a pipe. 

After graduate school, I slipped a disc working for an architect because I was leaning over a drafting table 24/7. In those days, the treatment was just a lie-down,

“…BUT I WAS TOO IMPATIENT TO JUST LIE THERE, SO I STARTED MY OWN FIRM FROM MY BED.  

In New York City, if you have a small architectural firm, you don't do big buildings. You do renovations. When I was pregnant with our second child,

I decided my values were pretty screwed up if I was going to the office every day to design for the 1%, specifying cabinet knobs when I had two kids who were only going to be babies once. My husband completely supported my wish to close the office and to stay at home with the kids. 

Motherhood gave me the wonderful opportunity to have a break in life and to think about what I wanted to do, and it wasn't designing rich people's apartments or restaurants or stores.  

While I was at home with the babies, I had to keep busy while they were in school, so I got active in a local environmental organization. I was able to study renewable energy, and I attended conferences when they came to New York. 

I met Richard Kauffman through a friend. Richard was starting a venture capital company called Good Energies that was only investing in renewables. He understood that renewables could generate as many clean electrons as they wanted, but the electrons would be sent to buildings that would waste them. He needed an architect who understood building energy efficiency, and he hired me.  

The learning curve was very steep and terrifying. I knew nothing about spreadsheets and the financial world. But I was useful because I was a domain expert in something they wanted to invest in. 

At the Urban Future Lab we offer a course through the Professional Studies program, at night and on weekends, which helps mid-career people put their talents to work in the sector. We can bring in anybody and use their skills to work on climate. If you're a banker, an accountant or an architect, you can come and learn about project finance or building energy efficiency or how energy is traded. 

If you’re crunching numbers all day for a big bank, you could, instead, do the same for a little startup that is pulling CO2 out of the air and turning it into useful projects or products, and then you can feel much better about yourself. I changed careers, my father changed careers, my mother changed careers, my husband changed careers, all in our 40 or 50s. There’s no reason not to be working on the climate. 

LIFE IS SHORT — I TRY TO FIGURE OUT WHAT BRINGS ME JOY.

This December, I took a staycation: I promised myself I would sleep 10 hours a night, go for long walks and read. In a week I read four books. I chopped a hole in the ice and jumped in the lake every day for three minutes. I did a walk in the woods after that, had dinner with friends, and was in bed by 9:30. It was the most wonderful vacation ever.