If you try to find a 100 thousand dollar loan
to replace the energy infrastructure in a
church, that's really hard to do. But if you
try to find 50 million dollars or 10 million
dollars to replace the heating and cooling
energy infrastructure in a hundred churches,
that's a lot easier to do, it turns out. So
part of our job is organizing and aggregating
enough projects and then we can take those
50 buildings to Goldman Sachs or Deutsche
Bank and get them to invest out of their renewable
energy arm, or out of their wealth management
arm. What that really means is that you're
looking for markets and business opportunity
where there hasn't been a whole lot of solutions
applied to that market.
So often when we talk about under served communities
we start with the challenge or the problem
or whatever it might be, rather than saying
what are the assets, what's the talent that
already exists here and how do we nurture
that? A part of growing a really good community
of entrepreneurs is not treating entrepreneurship
as a career path, but really treating it as
an experience, an opportunity, a set of skills.
And truly entrepreneurship is a feeling.
There is a massive amount of energy from people
who want to do good. And so you have people
who have had highly successful, highly productive
careers who want to spend some time in government
or the public sector trying to fix problems.
My dad says, "Conquering armies don't go home,
they go conquer something else." So people
who've had a high level of success in other
places in their career may give a city 8 hours,
10 hours, 12 hours to fix a process, or to
improve someone else's condition.
