 Good afternoon and welcome to today's energy seminar. Our speaker today is Maite Sanchez, who is, as you can see from the slide, the energy director at the Los Angeles Clean Tech Incubator, which seeks to do nothing less than create a clean tech ecosystem for Southern California from discovery all the way to commercialization. Kaiso Helping Firms run the gauntlet known as the Valley of Death through financing initiatives, marketing help, and whatnot. And she's extremely well prepared to do the job she's in now, because before that she was the legislative liaison with the state of California for the independent system operator, also known as Kaiso here in California, that runs the electric grid for the state. And before that, a legislative aide in the California State Assembly working in the energy environment area. So without further ado, I'm going to turn over to Maite to give her a talk today and tell us how it's all done. I think the idea here is to make this incubator, which is obviously a big one, kind of a model and something that could expand more throughout the U.S. and globally. Thanks, Don, for the introduction. Thanks for having me here today. So today I have the pleasure of talking about how we're building an inclusive green economy at the Los Angeles Clean Tech Incubator. But before I go ahead and do that and get started on the presentation, I just wanted to give you a little bit more information about myself and how I got to Lacy. So I first grew up in Los Angeles actually in the southeast portion of the county, specifically in the city of Monaballo, for those that are more familiar with Los Angeles. For my undergrad, I didn't go too far. I went out to the Claremont Colleges and majored in political studies and sociology. Didn't really know exactly what I was doing. But in terms of a career, I knew that I wanted to make a positive impact to the world, which led me to a fellowship at the state capitol, as John mentioned. And there I started covering energy issues. That was like the real first time that I had an understanding of the energy sector before, you know, growing up in California. And we have the familiarity, or I had familiarity with just generally being pro-environment but didn't really know too much beyond like recycling and being mindful of our waste and water. And during that period, while I was getting familiar with the sector, there was disruption that was really just beginning to occur. And it was really exciting because you could see all of these old business models needing to evolve and change. And you could see an amount of innovation coming forward that was just going to completely disrupt and also be very much more personal. And as someone who grew up with, you know, the computer evolving over time to now what we have, now with our devices, I was like, well, it's so fascinating. This is like exactly what's going to likely occur on the energy side, which also means a lot of job opportunities, which I was looking for and really excited about. But then on the other end, while I was becoming more familiar with the sector, I also came across a list that I believe was published by the US EPA, not the state. So I believe it was the US EPA. And it actually listed Montaballo, so the city I grew up in, as one of the most polluted cities in the US. And I was very shocked by it. You know, at that point, I was very aware of how where we grow up and the type of air quality that we have varies very much depending on history and race and wealth, et cetera. So it's not that I necessarily assumed that where I grew up, we had the best air quality, but I didn't think it was the worst. And that was very sobering. You know, I still have family there. I immediately think of my community and I very much wanted to figure out how I could help enable Cleaner World where we didn't necessarily have those types of issues anymore. Which officially validated my interest in energy. After that, I had the opportunity to go work for the independent system operator, which was a good experience that does understanding the sector issues at large and really understanding what it means to actually make the transition to a zero carbon grit. Which at that point, we knew it was very difficult, but we all, I think, underestimated how difficult it would be in the midst of climate change. During those years, we knew that that was going to, of course, exacerbate conditions, but now that we've seen we've had some rotating outages and are still at risk for outages going forward. So it's really hard as you're doing the transition and then also simultaneously being impacted in the way that we are with extreme weather events. So after my time at Kaizo, I was very much looking forward to going back to my community and really with the knowledge that I had at the sector at large, I wanted to get back to my neighborhood and begin to make a positive impact there. And then that's when the opportunity with Lacey emerged. That was around two years ago. And since then, it's been really great to be back in Los Angeles. And I'm excited to tell you more about what we're doing and looking forward to questions and as well as different ways that we could potentially partner together. So with that, I'll get started. So a little bit about Lacey. So we originally were founded in 2011 as a form of a public-private partnership between the city of Los Angeles and the Department of Water and Power. Since then, we've grown much more. We are also a nonprofit organization. So have evolved in terms of the structure. And our mission at Lacey is to build an inclusive green economy. So the way that we go about this is to do three different strategies. So the first one being unlocking innovation. So this is what we do to support our clean tech startups. So when you think about an incubator, the traditional service is there. And then our two other strategies, one of them is transforming markets. So we look to see what signals are missing within the market to accelerate clean tech adoption. And then the last one is enhancing communities. So this strategy ensures that throughout all of these stages, we're ensuring that underrepresented individuals and communities are a part of that transition. Within clean tech, we have three priorities. So the first one is clean transportation, as well as clean energy, and then smart sustainable cities, which is also what's commonly known as, or can be known as, circular economy. Our overall objective is to have a positive economic, environmental, and social impact. So we'll talk a little bit more about what this all means. So for unlocking innovation, we have three core incubation programs. The first one is Innovators. It's a free one-year program, and this is very much meant for early stage startups. So those that have, or in the pre-prototype or prototype development phase, the goal of this program is for them to get connected into our ecosystem and just become more aware of our different partners and networking opportunities. Our other two programs are more hands-on. So the first one being incubation. This is meant for pre-seed to seed startups. It's a two-year program, so it is a larger commitment. And our goal there is to ensure that we're getting them prepared for either the investment side, so getting ready to raise funds, as well as further validating their prototypes and technologies. And then our third one is Market Access. It's one of our newer programs, and this is specifically targeted for Series A+. So these are startups that are very much ready to deploy their technologies with partners and are commercially available. So to give you more information on these two programs and what this specifically means. So when you first enter our incubation program, we have six months of curriculum that essentially goes over a variety of things that essentially make you market and investment ready. The point of this curriculum is to ensure that everyone has a level set understanding and also has the opportunity to get to know Lacey as well as us to get to know the startups. So this is very much an emphasis on the relationship development. And then it also allows Lacey to get a sense of how we can best serve them to then prepare in terms of what services we're offering them. Along with this program, the startups get connected to what's known as an executive in residence. So it's a coach, mentor, advisor, and this is first matched depending on what they're needing. So if someone has, for instance, a lot of background in manufacturing, and this is like a big emphasis for the startup, then we would match them up there. In terms of what do you get when you, apart from these services that are like direct advisory ones, we also provide our startups with up to $20,000 in pilot funding. And what this allows the startups to do is to validate their technology for those that haven't had the opportunity to do so, or also further validate some findings that they're looking to show for potential customers. During the curriculum, we also help the startups come up with their pilot proposals. So we do have some sort of vetting that goes along with it. We want to ensure that the startups are best situated to deploy their pilot and really, you know, what makes a good pilot. So we go through all of that through their curriculum. And then I want, I do want to point out that we do take a 1.5 to 3% in equity in the form of a warrant. So we, along with this, established a program that allows the startups to buy back their equity. And the way that we do that is that we want to incentivize the startups to actually have a positive impact. So some examples of this are if within the two years that they're with us, if they increase their diversity or bring in women, black and brown members to their leadership team, if they specifically deploy their technologies and what the state has referred to as disadvantaged communities, or if they also hire from our local workforce trainings. So these are ways that we're able to tie back into our mission and also create incentives for the startups to do it within their own business development. And then our market access program, it's similar in the sense that the startup gets funding to also deploy pilots, but these tend to be larger scale. So we provide anywhere from 50 to $150,000. And they are allowed, of course, to join us in terms of the curriculum, but they're not required to do so. And these are very much so like companies that are already at that point where they're ready for market introduction. So a lot of that is introducing the startups to our partners and connecting them with the local community energy needs. All right, so a little bit about where we've been and where we're hoping to go. So since 2016, we've seen a 24% increase in our women founders. And we've also seen a 45% increase in support of overall underrepresented founders. So that spans across all of our programs in terms of what we're looking to do in the future in the next five years. So we're aiming to have 40% of our applicants be women and diverse founders. And then we also want to see a 50% increase in startup applicants with LGBTQIA plus and veteran founders. I do want to call this out because this is very much a part of our mission. So as we're doing recruitment and as we're doing selection, these are things that we take into consideration. And we also know that we have to be intentional about this. So the first thing we do is one, just establish the metric, right? That's the first step to do this. But then to actually support it is you really need to ensure that you have a network that you're intentionally doing this. So you're intentionally recruiting people of color across all of your programs. And I think one of the reasons, at least from my perspective, that we generally have been successful at this is that we also started off with our staff. So for all organizations who are taking diverse equity inclusion initiatives, it's very much a good reflection to start at your own organization and then look externally. So we do have a gender or diverse gender and racial team, which is something I'm very proud of. All right, so moving on to our second strategy, which is transforming markets. So this is a team that I'm a part of. I specifically see our clean energy initiatives. But to give you, to first take a step back and give you more of information around what we do in this team is that we work on convening different market leaders in transportation and energy and sustainable cities to figure out what are the signals that we need to be solving for. So what are the current barriers to this clean, for instance, clean energy transition and how can we collectively work together to enable those things, whether that's policy or whether that's something local, permitting, et cetera. We also, along with this, deploy pilots. So earlier I spoke about smaller skills pilots that our startups are working on. Lacey's team itself deploys larger scale startups. And this is where very much like our ecosystem of partners comes together to demonstrate what innovative solutions we can have in order to accelerate the adoption of clean tech. So this is a bit abstract. So to give you an example of one way that we've been doing this is our transportation electrification partnership. So this was originally founded in 2018 with the goal of accelerating transportation electrification. You know, now we have this outlook in 2022, which is much more positive than it was then. But we originally started this partnership because we did see very much like a gap in terms of having the legislation, having the local jurisdiction around supporting the electrification of transportation. And then here you'll notice the various partners that we have around this. We do a number of convening working groups with this partnership that then identifies, you know, where we need to go and what barriers are currently there in order to get there. And then, as I mentioned earlier, our pilots then work simultaneously to deploy some of those solutions. And then that also has informed our priorities within our transportation startups, so who we're looking to recruit to solve for some of these barriers. And I wanted to showcase a video to bring it a bit more to life in terms of how this has looked for the past couple of years. To succeed, the path to a zero-emission future must include addressing community needs, as well as tech and business challenges. Pilots are a focal point to Lacey's work because it is imperative that these technologies be accessible to the community. A lot of what we do is just listen to the community, listen to what they're struggling with day to day, and creating real solutions that meet their needs. Since launching these pilots across Los Angeles, we've heard of several ways that families have benefited through these programs. We are here in the parking lot of Rancho San Pedro. This is part of public housing, and this parking is for our envoy for the rental car. So far, Lacey has invested more than a million dollars in affordable mobility solutions for disadvantaged communities throughout LA County, and has launched a first-in-the-nation zero-emission delivery zone in Santa Monica. Designed to provide affordable travel options to improve air quality and to reduce congestion, these pilots inform policy recommendations here in the LA region, as well as inspire policies and pilots in cities around the world. We've had really good report with Lacey and past projects. The EB pilot was a very good chance for us to do something that not just helped the community with transportation, but it was also affordable and safe for the community, while still aligning with our model of environmental justice and sustainability. I believe the cars actually serve multiple purposes. The first one being that it is good for the community. It shows them that programs like this can run successfully here. It is also kind of a beacon of hope. It shows that the Coimbra beautiful is in the community. We're here to help you and we're not going anywhere for a couple of uses. We did have one user who specifically went out and bought their own EB car just because they utilized these. I used this car to go to my doctor to do shopping, to drop my kids to school, become my kids from school for work. We use it for a lot of different things. All the residents here, they really love this program in Rancho San Pedro. When you're low income, you don't have the money to pay all this insurance, the payments of the car, the rent and everything. That's why it is very good for us to have this car here. We always use it and they're very happy with this program. I want to say thank you, thank you to Lacey, thank you to Envoy, thank you to Lisa and Hacklett to bring this pilot program to Rancho San Pedro. It's very helpful to all these families for low income. Very good, thank you. So specifically for this pilot, we saw a barrier in terms of having equitable access to EVs. We've seen a bit of a change in California, but we still have ways to go on that end. But what we sought to do within this pilot is that we ended up establishing an EV car share program at two locations in Los Angeles at a site where it was affordable housing. We did have great success with the pilot. So we are currently pursuing legislation at the federal level with Congresswoman Barragan to establish this model throughout the U.S. So hopefully we'll see some movement on the legislation. But just to kind of note how this translated and how we're now hoping to also impact policy on that end. So you heard a little bit about transportation. More recently, we've been working to identify how we could do something similar on the clean energy sector. We very much came to this conclusion that we wanted to do something because of the fact that we've seen how climate change has exacerbated our vulnerabilities. And it's also very much made it difficult to continue this clean energy transition. So we want to be a part of the solution that attempts to solve for this and enables us to continue and have the successes or to build on the successes that we've had so far. So we have for like the past year and a half been convening local key energy stakeholders to figure out what we could do. There's so much going on in the sector. So we really wanted to do something that's going to bring value to the area and not necessarily just duplicate other current efforts. But along with this, we also reflected on, you know, what are our strengths as an organization and how could we support that? So we are currently in the very early development of creating a clean energy roadmap for the greater Los Angeles region. We ended up focusing or deciding to focus on the modernization of the local distribution grid. We see this as an area that has ways to go in terms of making that modernization and essentially creating the infrastructure that is needed to actually support the amount of distributed energy resources that we're likely to see and are pushing for. But then on the equity side, it also enhances local resilience. So, you know, we've been hearing about this for a number of years, but I think more recently with just like the extreme heat waves, power outages that are happening, the overloading of blinds, et cetera, we're seeing the need to add greater capacity more locally. And then another great benefit that DRS provides is that it also allows us to directly put the resources in the hands of all individuals. So low income individuals says we're making that transition to the clean or to have a clean grid. We want to be very mindful of the affordability side. So this is one of the other reasons that we leaned into the area. So what does this mean in terms of focusing in on the modern distribution grid? We are specifically looking to develop a large virtual power plant in the greater LA region to support community resilience, but then also specifically reduce our local reliance on natural gas, or what's also being more referred to as fossil gas. We're making this an intentional connection because of the fact that as we're seeing greater need for electrification, we're also or we're in the risk of also relying on fossil gas on the electric side. So we want to ensure that as we're doing this full transition that we have the capacity coming on that's actually clean. So it is so very early on, so this is all I can share at the moment. But if you do have interests, happy to connect with you on it. All right, so our last strategy. So enhancing communities. What does this mean when we talk about ensuring that underrepresented individuals are a part of this whole transition? So we have a number of programs, but I wanted to call out these three. One is Women in Clean Tech. So this is a committee that's actually open to anyone who would like to be a part of it. We specifically work on recruiting women founders to our startup programs, but then also supporting them once they're at LACI. And we do this through a number of events, as well as creating networking opportunities for them and then also identifying what issues they need most assistance with and hoping to create workshops around it. Our other one, I'll skip the green jobs fellowship because I have a couple of slides on that. But the other one that we, that's more recent, is our STEM middle school girl program. So we actually did research around different STEM programming. And we found that even though there has been an increase in STEM programs specifically for young girls to encourage them to pursue STEM careers, we actually noticed that there was a gap that linked those careers to the environment. So we wanted to create a specific program that actually had the linkage between STEM and also contributing positively to the environment. One of the last programs that they ended up doing was creating a prototype for electric vehicle school buses. And it was just really great, the ideas that they came up with, things that I had never thought about. So it's just fascinating to see the creativity there too. And then our green jobs fellowship program. So this is a multi-tiered workforce training pipeline program. So it provides technical training, but then also focuses on interpersonal skills. All the fellows are matched with a career coach. And there's also industry certified certifications that they come from, that come from the training. Apart from the most obvious one being that fellows walk away with an increase in some sort of skill training, they also get connected to our ecosystem. As we all know, it matters who you know. And it matters that you're a part of a larger network when you're trying to actually get employment. So we have a number of different individuals. We specifically target low-income individuals who are underemployed or unemployed. Sometimes we have individuals who have their undergraduate degree, but just haven't had the ability to get placed in a specific job. So this also allows them to just connect into our network and hopefully actually land a job. After they've done their training, they actually have the opportunity to then do an internship. And the internship is through either our partners or startups. And the goal is ultimately to get them placed at a job or also another common step that fellows take is go back to school. But what's great about the program itself is that it also provides with more of an understanding of what to actually focus on when they're pursuing their higher education. These are a couple of our past training. So you'll see there we've had an EV network technician training, EV maintenance, software development, and IT support, EV network technician training, et cetera. So these are the different programs that I referenced earlier when we're talking about opportunities to earn equity back. So if our startups do end up hiring fellows from part of these trainings, they actually, that counts towards those metrics. So this is one of the ways that we also just interlink our programming to ensure that we're continuing to build our inclusive green economy. And then I did have another video of one of the individuals who has gone through one of our programs. I grew up in South Central Los Angeles. My grandmother had a house on 62nd between Manor, Broadway. And my little brother, we played at the Catholic Church, played at the Throne Park. Anything we can do to the past time and stay busy and try not to think about what was going on back at home. At the same time, I started falling into that game like when I didn't stay focused. We didn't have a chance. We didn't know no better. And so all we knew when we stepped out that door of survival ended the day. I had been through a lot, seen a lot, but I want to share my story because it might help somebody. Hi, my name is Maurice Gator. I'm a graduate from Lacey's workforce development program. I had that feeling to where I could be helping the world, helping my daughter, helping her kids, helping just generations by keeping this clean tip going and introducing it to my neighborhood to the people who look up to me. I graduated from high school and prison and I started college in prison. I ended up running across a good teacher in prison. I stayed focused. Got my high school diploma and just started going. College questions through the mail. Anything I didn't find hoping. I was always curious with education so when I heard about this opportunity, I felt like I couldn't lose. I went in prison and I used it as college. Look what it's leading me to now. Lacey intentionally recruits participants from underrepresented communities throughout South LA and LA County at large and provide technical training to those participants in the technology that's most needed in this emerging green economy. And we place our participants with paid internships with our Lacey startups and partner organizations. It was the best experience because I had some good classmates. I had a perfect professor. Nobody does this. It was hands on, they all helped each other and I was continuously every day, every week getting more familiar with, hey, this is life, man get used to it, you know, you gotta change, you gotta catch up. We're super excited to be part of the Lacey program and we hope to keep on developing this relationship and bringing on more individuals that can help grow our team. We can help employ individuals in the local area also. That's so in one for everyone. I can see myself owning one, driving one, working on it again in this field, the rest of my life. I just wanna say to Lacey, Professor Samadini, thank you for this opportunity of giving me, not just the opportunity, the thought of being able to change, being in a position to change, meeting new people, meeting new career. It's not just a job, this is a career, this is big business, it's a serious, it's the future. And I highly appreciate you, you know, I'm not gonna let you down and I'm here to stay. All right, so on that note, we actually just launched a new training that started today. I had the pleasure of working with my colleague Daniel on this. So we're specifically focusing this cohort on a microgrid maintenance training program that's going to be focused on solar plus storage. So for the next two months, our fellows will be going through this training and we've partnered with Arizona State University to go over the training itself. And actually that reminded me that we had another program just launch, or that is launching this week, I believe tomorrow, and that's our equity innovation program. So something else we've been reflecting on is, okay, so as we do increase our diversity of our founders, you know, that's really great, but what are we doing once they're here? Because we acknowledge that not everyone comes to our programs with the same background. We have some founders who, you know, this isn't the first startup, for instance, or who have access to capital to actually support the development of their technologies while other individuals come forward and they said, I had this idea. I don't really know how to make it a reality. I can't really lean on my family to provide the funding to support it. How do I raise money? So those different set of needs are very different and we acknowledge that. So we established the equity innovation program to provide additional support for our diverse founders. It's completely voluntary, so whoever comes from an underrepresented background and would like to be a part of it, they then are welcome to do that. So more to come on that end, but I did wanna acknowledge that that was the launch of another new program this week and with that, I believe that is all. So thank you so much. Looking forward to questions. I provided a series of different ways that you can connect with us. We also have newsletters that come out that allows you to stay in touch with Lacey and figure out other ways that we could collaborate together. Thank you. Yep. Thanks very much, Maytai. That was both informative, inspiring, and really cool, very, very innovative, I must say. So I think immediately what springs to mind for me is there are a lot of disadvantaged and poor people in rural America and we have a lot of people in our audience who are concerned about helping them translate. So let me kick off the questions by saying, do you have any outreach to groups like that maybe through the Energy Department, EPA, or directly to rural communities in the US or abroad? Yeah, definitely. I think the key thing is that there are a lot of community organizations who have historically already been serving these committees for a number of years. So within our work, we don't assume that we know what's best for committee members. So what we do, for instance, is as we deploy our pilots, we first, I didn't go into the details, but we have different types of pilots. Just to quickly bring you guys up to speed, one of them is a community benefits pilot and we specifically deploy these pilots within disadvantaged communities. But what we do is actually first seek to collaborate with the local community, so that could be a community-based organization, for instance, and then figure out specifically what they're in need of. So the perfect example, the one that you're all familiar with was the EV Car Share Program. So we partnered with Pacoima Beautiful and found that there was a need for just general transportation. LA is very sparse. It's really hard to get around our transportation. Unfortunately, our public transportation isn't the best. It's a working progress. But in the meantime, we saw a solution around having an EV Car Share Program. So I guess I would first say that just look around your research and figure out what community you'd like to work with and then who you could connect with to ensure that you're doing authentic engagement and that you're also being mindful and respectful towards the strategies about how you go about that. But there's so much out there and so many resources and, for instance, the State of California has also established a variety of ways for startups to get plugged in. One of them is through their innovation ecosystem, I believe, website, which allows you to get connected to the larger community. And the Department of Energy is also doing a significant amount of work on this end. So it's really exciting. There's so much opportunity, as I'm sure you're all aware. And yeah, more to come on that end. Thank you so much for the wonderful talk. I was interested in the middle school girls in STEM program. I think that was the name. It sounds super interesting. And I was wondering whether the program is mostly hands-on, so the outcome is for the girls to build something related to climate change, or is there a curriculum that they follow related to climate change and clean development, which ends up with a project? Yeah, so it has varied. And a lot of our program does tend to evolve, which I think is something that's not always as common anywhere you work at, which I greatly appreciate. But part of the programming is to, one, bring to the front that, yes, climate change is real. These are the potential impacts. However, you can be a part of that solution. So a lot of the curriculum does then focus in on a topic. So as you saw, one of the previous ones, I believe, was getting solar on your school. So how do you get that and what does that look like? And then going forth and exploring what solar energy is and where does that come from, et cetera, and then officially helping them so they all get paired with the coach as well. So there's a partner engagement there that comes into play. And then they coach them through how you go about getting an idea into a prototype and go through that whole process. And then at the end, when they do their presentation, you very much see the type of training that they've had in education because a lot of that is like at the beginning, like what is solar energy and how can we get it to our schools? And you see the evolution of then going from there and teaching us about it and then getting to the point where they're also demonstrating their prototype and how they developed it. And just a quick follow-up, how long is the program usually? I think it's about eight weeks, six to eight weeks. Thank you. Yeah, and that's, it's voluntary from the school side. So we have some amazing teachers who also agree to do this and put some extra time around it. So we're very appreciative of that. Thanks. Thank you so much. I was wondering what's the virtual power plant? Like what makes it virtual? Yeah, so virtual meaning that we're essentially aiming to develop an infrastructure that allows the aggregation of the distributed energy resources to then respond to the needs of the grid, the way a traditional, for instance, fossil gas or coal plant has in the past. So just to give you a bit of background for those less familiar with is that renewables, when you have a resource online, you have two key things that it's doing at a very basic level. One of them is providing energy, right? And then the other one is providing the services that we need in order to have the stability to get energy from one place to another. So within that, in the past, fossil plants would actually, fossil gas plants would actually do both services. When renewables first came into play, and one of the reasons that they were also heavily criticized by opposition, they were only providing energy. And it wasn't because they couldn't do the other services, but at that time, there wasn't an understanding that they fully could, and it also wasn't instantly as cost effective. Since then, we come a long way, and they are now doing both. So what we'd like to do with the virtual power plant is also have DERs play a similar role in the way that traditional larger scale plants would. Cool, thank you. You're welcome. I have a question related to community pilots. If you can tell us more about how do you identify the community that is going to be benefited by that pilot program? And also if there is like an awareness raising program, when you do that, and how do you get together the community and raise the awareness on using clean energies? And also, how do you evaluate and follow up the program and the benefits of the EV share vehicles program afterwards? Thank you. Okay, hopefully I can answer all the questions. So the first one being how do we pick the community that we partner up with? So what we do is actually put out a request for information. So we just went through this process back in January and February recently, because as I mentioned, we just ended our first round of community benefit pilots and are now looking to deploy our next round. But when we put out the RFI, we essentially call out for different community organizations to respond to it. So we ensure to get the word out to our local community partners while we're also doing that. But essentially we ask them to put forward a type of general solution that they like to see in their community and how it's addressing one of the problems that they're seeking to solve. And then we go through the process and review that proposal and then figure out if we actually have the innovative solution to support that. And then match our startups with that specific proposal. Our priorities also inform what type of areas we're looking to explore. So for instance, another thing that I didn't go into detail about, but part of our work at Market Transformation is also establishing our priorities within our different, larger priorities of transportation, energy and sustainable cities. So for instance, one of our priorities this year has been around building decarbonization. So that then seeks to inform our larger programming work. So like for instance, the microgrid training, we're looking to deploy likely a building decarbonization pilot that might translate in our community benefits. So that's the way that we end up mirroring our priorities and then also figuring out how we can best match the solution to the problem that the community is seeking to address. And then in terms of your last question, we as we have the pilot being deployed, we don't just, you know, stop or deploy the solution and then leave. We are working at least for a year with the community and deploying that pilot. So as we're doing that, we're collecting data to then inform, you know, what's going on. One of the things that we've learned from this last round of community benefit pilots is that we needed more funding to support marketing and outreach. And that's probably a common lesson. It's not a very surprising one, but I think we still underestimated how much. And part of that is, you know, we're working with new technologies. Not everyone has driven an electric vehicle. So what's, you know, what happens when we have a new technology? You mostly don't want to touch it. You're like, what if I get electrocuted? I don't know. Generally, I've always been very careful around anything with electricity. So a lot of what went around that pilot was just general education. That, and then it goes back to working with our community partners. So Puecoema Beautiful, who worked really closely to develop workshops to outreach around it so that we could have, for instance, greater usage. I hope I answered all your questions. You have all of them. Thank you. Thank you. This is incredible work and sounds exactly like what we need to see everywhere. So thank you for sharing this with us. And I'm really struck by just the intentionality behind all the programs and how it all ties together and the community first approach. And I'm really curious about how something like Lacey comes together and Lacey as an organization. And I'm really curious, could you talk more about maybe like the founding of Lacey and the different partnerships involved and maybe like the public versus private and how all that comes together to make something like Lacey possible? Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I was very similarly when I started working there. I was very much intrigued by that question of like, oh, this is different and it's very authentic, which is something that isn't always easy to find. But the organization itself has evolved so much since 2011. Originally, I think it become, when it was established, it was more of like a traditional incubator. So very much as it should be because that was the reason it was founded, but very much focused on supporting the development of startups in the clean tech industry. During that time, they would just bring in startups at any points and there was eventually this realization of how can we bring more structure to this? Now that we've had a couple of years in and that we're not necessarily just operating ourselves as a startup. So with that came more of that formalization over programming. So having that early stage, mid stage to later stage programs, and then also came cohort models. So now when our startups come to Lacey, they're a part of a specific class. And what we've seen since we've had these cohort models is also just better support amongst one each other. So something that we also are very intentional about is saying that once you enter Lacey, you're part of the Lacey family. So if another founder is giving you a call and asking for advice because there's also so much value is from peer to peer sharing and knowledge. So when they are giving you that call, make sure to answer it and return that favor because we're all in this together. But in terms of the structure of the organization and how we evolved, I will give credit a lot to our CEO. So Matt Peterson, so a little bit of background on him. Prior to coming to Lacey, he was the first chief sustainability officer for the city of Los Angeles and ended up leaving the position to then become CEO at Lacey. And part of the, and he'll speak to this, part of the reason that he left was that he did see as transportation electrification as one of the biggest barriers that we needed to solve for and really needed to solve for to also improve our air quality and reduce our GHG emissions, et cetera. So having, I think him come in and have that intimate understanding of the role of the public sector, then informed the way we evolved, which led to those three different strategies. So we went through a whole analysis of like, all right, what's our mission? So if our mission is to build an inclusive green economy, what can we then do? What are the key strategies to get us to that place? And also within the understanding of who we were as an organization and what value we could bring to the area. Thank you so much for a great presentation. I guess I have a couple of questions. My first would be given that Stanford is trying to start sustainability accelerator from your learnings running this incredible organization. What, I guess, would you say are your biggest takeaways or things that if you could name two or three things that Stanford could look out for? And also my second question is just I was curious as to whether or not you have specific metrics that you're trying to hit for previously incarcerated people given your other diversity metrics. Yeah, thanks, Fola. By the way, I wanna give a shout out to Fola who is one of our founders at LAC with Electric Fish. Very, very proud of her. Yeah, so I think one thing and kind of going back to the authenticity site is really leaning on who you are as an institution. What are your strengths, acknowledging those and also I think as we all should be like mindful of limitations, whatever that means. So we're at this place where it's 2022, there's been so much work done. So where can you start to help actually bring more impactful change? I would say like leverage resources. And I think that's what we're all seeking to do. We are a very collaborative organization. We understand where our limitations are at and lean on others or refer, for instance, our startups to other types of accelerators or incubators or just different programings because there's already so much being done. And then some other things. I think for me and when I reflect on my career, for me it's always very much been about the people, right? Yes, of course, we need to take care of our environment. The amount of damage that is coming our way is frightening if we don't do more to do to address it. But it's also about what are the real life implications now? So I think if there are ways to leverage the solutions that you're developing here and the lessons that are learned here with what's actually going on at the city level, tying it back to actual policies and the ways that your community is currently being impacted are key for that. And then in terms of formally incarcerated individuals, so we don't have a specific metric for that. However, we have had cohorts in the past or a cohort in the past that was specifically centered to provide trainings for individuals who were formerly incarcerated. So that's put of our just transition work, when we're doing general recruitment, that's something that we definitely prioritize and take into consideration. So it's part of our ongoing work and acknowledging that that's very much a population that is ideal for the type of programming that we're doing. Yeah, regretfully, we're out of time. Thanks for a spectacular talk to the audience for really, really good questions. I would say that if you ever thought about thinking into this, you could actually do this talk into a TED talk, and so it gets more of a play. I haven't, but I always welcome more to get the word out. I think... That's great. I hear most people are on TikToks these days, so maybe that's the way. Thank you.