Week 27.

Last week was a productive one. Accomplished the following:

• Got verbal commitment for our first large microgrid project
• Had a number of productive meetings with investors and founder/CEO’s about making potential investments into leading long-tail focused solar companies
• Continued work on further developing the Become a Solar Entrepreneur course
• Developed the Video Testimonial storyboard for SolarAcademy referrals

Goals for this week are similar to last weeks:

• Further develop the details of each module of “Become a Solar Entrepreneur”.
• Develop the outline for our next 2 courses (How to Buy Solar for Resi & Commercial property owners).
• Start putting down thoughts about Learning Paths for various roles in the industry
• Work on the next version of the SolarAcademy home page reflecting the new courses and various sections for property owners as well as contractors.
• Work on the Video Testimonial storyboard for customer referrals
• Explore hybrid models of organizational structures for SolarAcademy

This week one of the questions in my mind is about how to plan and organize the legal, governance, ownership and management decision-making structure of SolarAcademy. So I have been researching various types of org structures like LLC’s, co-ops, nonprofits, collectives, etc. 

This process reminded me of a conversation I had with a colleague a few years ago. I was telling him about this talk where Jeff Bezos shared with the audience that there are basically 3 ways to organize people to achieve collective objectives: For-profits, nonprofits, and governments. 

At that moment, my colleague paused me and said, “No, Kerim. There is a fourth way. The Martin Luther King way. You just start a movement. No legal structure is needed.”

Why am I sharing all this? Because my search for a hybrid model made me think hard about the current social, political, financial, and legal structures we have created as humanity. While they are getting continuously better, there is always room for improvement. 

My thought process bought up these two quotes I remember, by Barbara Marx Hubbard: 

“Not only did evolution for billions of years rise to higher complexity, higher-order, and greater freedom of choice to destroy or create, but it was going somewhere that—if we got there and if that thinking layer of Earth were to be filled with love, innovation, and creativity—it would be like the nervous system of a newborn baby. It would connect the whole planetary organism, which is a living planetary organism, into a state—in [Teilhard’s] language—of the Christ-ification of Earth. And I’ve come to call it a planetary awakening, a planetary birth, a global brain turning on. There are many versions of it.”

“As systems become more complex, they obviously become more interactive, with separate parts coming together to form radically new whole systems greater than the sum of the parts. So, in a way, the way nature does it is not only by individual organisms but the coming-together of separate organisms—like our bodies with 50 trillion cells (not even counting the microbes)—organized as a body.”

So my mission with SolarAcademy is not only to accelerate the dissemination of solar energy knowledge but also to create a better system for organizing a body of people around that objective. Probably a hybrid system. An org structure and a system that is more connected, more equitable, and healthy, than our current obvious options.