 It is my pleasure and honor to be here today to present the 2021 C3E Entrepreneurship Award to Steph Spears. This award recognizes entrepreneurs who've developed and demonstrated innovative clean energy technologies or business models that have the potential to drive market print formation towards clean energy and be real game changers. Steph exemplifies the reason we have this award. Steph is an entrepreneur, a community builder, and she has management experience in the Middle East, South Asia and the United States. She is the co-founder and CEO of Solstice, an enterprise dedicated to radically expanding the number of American households that can take advantage of community-based solar. Solstice is working hard to remove financial and language barriers for solar to renters, low-credit households, and other Americans who've been left out of the clean energy transition. She's going to tell you more, but it's an amazing experience, an amazing business that she is running. Before founding Solstice, Steph led sales and marketing innovation initiatives in India. She spearheaded venture capital firm Acumen's Renewable Energy Investment Strategy in Pakistan. She developed Middle East policy as the youngest policy director at the White House Office of National Security Council, and she served as a special assistant in the office of the secretary of the US Department of Homeland Security. If you can't imagine, Steph's work hasn't gone unnoticed. She's gotten some other recognition I just want to highlight because she probably won't. She was selected as an LUS Women Entrepreneur of the Year, Inc. magazine's female founder 100, and as a renewable world, 40 under 40 and solar award winner. It's been a pleasure to get to know Steph through this process. I can't wait to have you hear from her. Her experience, drive, mentorship, and the caring she has for women in clean energy will be evident when you get to hear from her yourself. And with that, I'm going to stop talking so she can. Steph, I'm turning it over to you. Congratulations on being this year's Entrepreneurship Award winner. Thank you so much, Maria. Thank you for that really kind introduction. On the topic of entrepreneurship, there's actually an Ohio State University study out there that says that if you're an entrepreneur, and you have a child, your child is 1.8 to three times more likely to be an entrepreneur themselves. And I remember hearing this statistic and thinking, that seems a little bit like garbage to me personally because my dad was an entrepreneur, and it made me want none of that. He actually had a failed business, and it was the reason why my family started eating on food stamps. It was the reason why my mom started working minimum wage jobs to support us. And it was the reason why we were bouncing around for a couple of years without a home living in spare bedrooms. And I'll actually never forget the day that we moved into our first apartment after those first couple of years. My mom had taken her three kids and started to raise us alone as a single mom. And my mom is an immigrant as well. And she walked us into the apartment and it had dirty floors and dirty walls. And it was a one bedroom that the four of us were going to share and she had saved up for years for this apartment. And she walked us in and she's had this huge smile on her face and she said, isn't this amazing. This is ours. This is our home. And I realized that there's actually nothing more entrepreneurial than the immigrant story. It's the story of giving up everything like your personal comfort your mother tongue and going out in a world and forging a reality that doesn't exist yet that you can only imagine but not yet see. There's also nothing more entrepreneurial than being a single mom who is no matter what the world is doing to conspire against you, you're putting one foot in front of the other, hoping that your children's lives will be better than your own. And in a lot of ways I think that's the kind of entrepreneurship we need more of and clean energy. And what so many women in this community are doing is imagining a world that is a better one that we're living in now. I just because we don't have a good fight go score does not mean that we're bad people. And that stuck with me, even in our work that we do today at solstice solstice exists to include historically excluded populations like low income folks black communities and people of color in the clean energy revolution, because they've been most affected by climate change they have the highest energy burden, and they're the least likely to get solar right now in this country. And to get solar in this country you actually need a fight go credit score of 680 and above, which half the country doesn't have. We're actually experiencing a type of clean energy redlining right now, where we're excluding entire populations from benefiting from solar by virtue of their credit score. And yes your credit score is your destiny in America, but your credit score was invented in 1956. You can measure your rental history, your cell phone history, or your, your utility repayment history. And so one of the things we've done at solstice is try to create a new score called the energy score. And it's based on your utility repayment history and a bunch of other demographic and financial data. And we've proven that it's more accurate at predicting who pays their utility bills on time compared to fight go. And it's more inclusive of low income Americans that would have been locked out of clean energy. If we adjust use their fight go credit score. So, what we're talking about is, yes, fight go scores are your destiny in America, but we need more innovation and entrepreneurship that rewrites that destiny that gets beyond the archaic algorithms of 1956 and moves us into a future that is more equitable and is more accessible to people. Because if we've learned anything from both the pandemic and the climate crisis, it's that everything we do eventually affects other people and comes back to us. And that something that happens across the world is going to eventually end up at our doorstep. And so we should care if our clean energy system is including everyone, but it is really hard work and it's lonely work. What gets done is if we work in community to do it together. And so that's why I'm so honored, the word honored doesn't entirely capture how privileged I feel to be a part of this community. And it's how thankful I am for this award. You're helping us build solstice to a company that can serve more people who are historically excluded from clean energy. And the reason why our company exists is because women investors women advisors, who saved us in the midst of coven when our revenues dropped 80% and since then, we've grown by seven X. And so that's the power of community is widening the circle of the people we can reach because we're in community together. So thanks for everyone for your for kind support. And Steph, I'm sitting here with tears in my eyes as I listened to you talk so I'm hoping I can hold it together here for the next section but congratulations and thank you so much for sharing your story.