OBUGs, Literacy for Environmental Justice, and Hands On Bay Area

I have been spending time volunteering for a variety of organizations over the last few months through a volunteer aggregator called Hands On Bay Area. I have two goals, to get a (brief) experience of many different organizations offering a variety of services and ultimately to focus on one and take on more substantive volunteer projects. Below are pictures from two recent projects:

Literacy for Environmental Justice:
LEJ work with youth to educate them on habitat restoration and sustainable food production. They have a full scale nursery where they prepare plants to be transplanted in areas like the one we were working on below. They collect the seeds for these plants locally and use them to push back invasive species like fennel.

The youth are teaching us about the grasses and shrubs we will be planting. The area we were working in is one of the more established sites, the native plants have started to take hold again.

Some local municipalities have started to contract with LEJ to provide local plants for open space projects, allowing them to hire some of the students who come through their program. 

Oakland Builds Urban Gardens:

OBUGs works with middle schools in Oakland to convert part of their parking lot or pavement into garden space which they incorporate into the school's curriculum. Much of the produce from the garden goes to the cafeteria. OBUGs teaches kids about how fresh food and activity are part of a healthy lifestyle. 

OBUGs staff staff teach students how to care for the garden. Volunteers also do a lot of garden maintenance on the weekends, including building new beds. 

Tom and Preston building individual boxes so students can decide what they want to grow. It's hard work, you have to rest too :)

You can't do much better than spending the morning working in the garden on a nice day. We also trimmed down a big Rosemary bush and we some home. It was spilling out of my backpack which made us very popular and we traded Rosemary for cookies and pie at lunch!

The parking lot is converted to a growing space by covering the ground with bark mulch and then building raised beds.

First Round Capital Exchange Fund

First Round is one of the investors in VigLink (Google Ventures is another), so I have started watching them. Oliver, our CEO, was at the CEO/Founder summit last week, which sounded amazing. I was especially excited by this announcement of their new exchange fund. Josh Kopelman describes the benefits well,

"When I was an entrepreneur, I remember the feeling of having all my eggs in one basket -- and it is our hope that this fund will remove some of that stress.  Now our entrepreneurs can get the same diversified portfolio that our limited partners get (with better economic terms) and receive a financial benefit when other First Round Companies exit (even if their own company is still years away from an exit)."


I agree that mediating risk with this diversification removes a barrier to founding a company, but the thing that is most exciting to me about the exchange fund is the sense of community it must facilitate among the participating entrepreneurs. I have heard many blogs describe the process of starting a company as lonely and stressful, which it is. But for a carefully selected community of founders, which First Round's portfolio is, I imagine the potential for personal and professional synergy and coordination is massive!


See coverage here and here.

VigLink

I started my new job last week at VigLink! I am very excited for this opportunity, and the biggest reason is the people I now get to be associated with. I really like the team (we are 5), there is excitement about what we are doing and the atmosphere in the office is very focused and driven without feeling at all frantic. We have an exciting product, I am learning the industry, and ready to rock and roll! Check out some great press about the release just before I came on board. It is an all-star group of investors as well, see my post here about a cool initiative at First Round.

Moving on, and Starting Up

Over the Holidays I made the decision to leave Colorado Forest and Energy and move to San Francisco.  I made this decision for many reasons, lack of faith in the quality of the product or the future of the business is not one of them. I believe strongly that in the energy world centralized will be replaced by distributed, products making effective use of waste have an advantage, and modular systems that are easy to deploy can gain a foothold quickly and be successful. The most important reason (in code) for the move is that it will remove the LD from the R with my SO. I am in San Francisco, living in Noe Valley (with my SO). So far I have found the magic curry kart twitter.com/magiccurrykart and the sexy soup cart twitter.com/sexysoupcart, and I have decided that I will become a connoisseur of food carts in the Mission (the creme brulee cart will be my white whale). I love our apartment, our roommates, and the first week of living here has gone off without a hitch. I am actively job hunting, which is turning out to be a fun and fascinating process. I am learning a great deal and enjoying the search quite a bit. I am very excited by the prospects I have so far, and I look forward to posting about what I decide to do.