Getting Excited!

With little over a week until we head out, I'm starting to get very excited about our adventure. I'm visiting Vancouver for the weekend, tying up loose ends here before finishing up my internship in Seattle, packing up, and flying to Africa. Tonight we will celebrate with our final fundraising event at Lola's:
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=101949074730


My internship has been focused on helping a small start-up cleantech company called Blue Marble Energy with their marketing communication efforts. They convert a wide variety of waste biomass sources into clean burning natural gas for energy, as well has high margin biochemicals for food and manufacturing industry.

They basically convert pollution and waste problems into clean energy and manufacturing solutions. It has been an interesting learning experience in how to communicate a complex value proposition to a wide range of target stakeholders, and I've been thinking about what kind of new and surprising value propositions and tarket markets we will encounter with our students business plans.

Learning about alternative energy has led me to follow this amazing blog by T.H. Culhane, an Urban Planning prof at UCLA who has started bringing simple cleantech solutions like solar water heating and biogas digestors to slums across the developing world. It would be incredible to see some of charitable work that his group Solar Cities is doing transform into small, locally owned energy businesses by entrepreneurs.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7xr5oW7b9I
http://solarcities.blogspot.com/

I've also been reading a fantastic book that I would highly recomend, called The Blue Sweater, by Jaqueline Novogratz. It's about her impressive development work in Africa, and how small business development can address many of the failures of that traditional aid programs face. She has a number of great TED talks on the subject as well that you can find here:

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/jacqueline_novogratz_invests_in_ending_poverty.html

That's all for now. Kenya here we come!