Sitting in an airport making a connection to Chicago and thought I’d clear something up.
I’m not the Aaron Klein who is Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy in President Obama’s Treasury Department.
I’m also not the Aaron Klein who is Jerusalem Bureau Chief for WorldNetDaily and wrote the book “The Manchurian President” about President Obama.
I guess I’m somewhere between those two.
Glad I could clear that up… 
The Union covered the news today that AMSOLAR was unable to come up with a competitive price for the Sierra College solar project that will take about 20% of Rocklin campus and 90% of Nevada County Campus off the grid. The project was launched back in January and staff selected AMSOLAR as the first place firm, and Borrego Solar as the second place firm in April.
“One of the ground rules with this project is that it can’t cost the college any more for energy than what we’re paying now,” Doty said. “The AMSOLAR deal didn’t pencil out for us.”
The college is now negotiating with Berkeley, Calif.-based Borrego Solar, Doty said. Borrego has installed other solar arrays at public schools, according to the company’s website.
If negotiations go well, the contract could come before the Sierra College Board of Trustees meeting in September and construction could start as early as the end of the year, Doty said. The school originally targeted this summer for construction to begin on the array.
“We are committed to a solar project that saves Sierra College money on day one, and I’m pleased that our staff planned ahead for the possibility that things wouldn’t work out with the first place firm,” said Sierra College Trustee Aaron Klein, who represents parts of Nevada County. “We continue to be excited about the potential of being better stewards of our planet while saving precious dollars in our operating budget.”
Last year, the first-ever Orphan Sunday happened to be set for the same day we were celebrating “Spencer Day” – the day we brought Spencer home and he made us parents. That was an incredibly special time and we enjoyed celebrating it with friends.
This year, Orphan Sunday 2010 has been set for November 7. Christian Alliance for Orphans, the group headed by my friend Jedd Medefind, is aiming for 2,000 Orphan Sunday events across the United States.
I’m working to make sure one happens in my community. I hope you will too!
Sierra College President Leo Chavez has announced that he’ll retire after one more year at the helm. This is the e-mail he just sent to the entire college staff to let them know the news.
After much thought and deliberation I have tendered my letter of retirement effective June 30th, 2011 to the Board of Trustees. I do such with decidedly mixed emotions knowing I am leaving a great opportunity working with such wonderful, skilled, and dedicated colleagues. I wish I could give you a simple reason for my decision, but there are many, some simple and some complicated, so all I will say is that it is time. I have had the honor to work in our system since 1978 and I have been a CEO since 1989. I told myself a long time ago I would leave when things were going well rather than hang around too long and be pushed out as has happened to far too many of my colleagues nationwide. In other words, there is nothing negative about my decision, nor do I fear for the future. It is simply time.
I have told the Board that I will work with them to effect a smooth transition and that, having no definitive plans, I could remain until a new President is found or otherwise perform any other duties the board may find of use to the district after June 30th of next year. I am, however, looking forward to the day I wake up and have to decide what I would like to do that day. In the meantime, we have much work to do and I look forward to a very productive year working with all of you.
Leo has been precisely the leader Sierra College needed to make the major changes in direction that the Board wanted to make over the last four years. While I wish he could have stayed here for another five or ten, he has accomplished everything the board has asked him to do.
He deserves the thanks of every taxpayer, student, faculty and staff member at Sierra College for his service – and we look forward to his continued leadership during this next year as we start to plan a transition.
I know, I know – I’m getting a lot of e-mails from you all who want to read the next installment of the “It’s Time to Change the World” series of blog posts. I want those posts to stand the test of time, so I am taking my sweet time making sure my thoughts are well-organized and cogent before I hit “publish.”
But in the mean time, here’s something interesting on the subject.
I had an exciting invitation about a week ago that I was thrilled to accept.
Back when Cacey and I were heading to Africa for the first time, my international roaming SIM card was having some problems. I tweeted about it, and out of the blue, a former marketing exec at that company tweeted back and connected me with another extraordinary person who fixed it.
Since then, I’ve become a big fan of that former marketing exec, Jackie Danicki. She now leads communications and external relations at Innovations for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health, a project of Concern Worldwide US.
The “Innovations” project came about because of a $41 million dollar grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to create “bold and inventive ways to overcome barriers to delivering proven maternal, newborn, and child health solutions.”
As I’m sure you can see, maternal and child mortality have a tremendous impact on developing world poverty and the global orphan crisis. At best, a mother dying in childbirth leaves the remaining single-parent family teetering on the edge of poverty by removing 50% of the adults from the family. At worst, the remaining children instantly become orphans with no one to care for them.
Bringing real change to maternal, newborn and child health in the developing world will have a tremendous positive impact on lessening poverty and solving the global orphan crisis.
“Innovations” held an exciting competition for new ideas in the field. You can watch this video about what they did in Sierra Leone, Malawi, and India.
(Mobile, feed and e-mail readers: the video is embedded above.)
Now, a small panel facilitated by retired Intel CEO Craig Barrett, will be meeting next week in New York City to discuss and analyze the process.
I was more than a little bit surprised and humbled to be invited to join this group of people.
I’m hoping that my work in entrepreneurial business and product development, combined with my passion for Africa and the developing world, can contribute some useful ideas and out-of-the-box thinking to the process.
So on Saturday night, I’ll hop a red-eye to NYC (this is what happens when you buy plane tickets at the last minute). Along with some other meetings, the panel is on Tuesday and I fly home on Wednesday.
I’ll let you know what I see and learn there!
I apologize for the lack of posts! Given the nature of life, work and public service right now, I’m going to dial back a bit and shoot for three posts a week instead of five. I might have a shot at actually achieving a little more consistency!
I’m looking forward to talking more about the emerging solutions I’ve been learning about in the “Change the World” series of posts. Hoping to get back to that topic very soon next week.
I leave you with two pictures of some of my favorite little people having a blast over the Independence Day holiday – Emma just being her happy, cute self, and Spencer fishing with my dad at Trinity Lake.
Have a great weekend!
Board Retreat Details:
Our annual board retreat will be a discussion of long term planning issues and laying the groundwork for the main initiatives the board will want to pursue over the next year. The public is always welcome at our meetings, although the focus is long term planning over action, and public attendance at retreats is rare.
Our thoughts and prayers remain with Trustee Elaine Rowen Reynoso, who is not expected to attend the retreat. We wish her a speedy recovery.
Many of you probably remember when we were stuck in Ethiopia and couldn’t get a visa issued for Emma to depart with us to the United States. There was some paperwork missing, and we were in trouble.
Through the help of Congressman McClintock’s crack staff, we were put in contact with a woman named Ruth Lincoln who works in the State Department. She tracked down the right paperwork, got it to the US Embassy in time, and we made our flight with visa in hand.
I finally connected with her on the telephone a few days ago to express our thanks, but after I hung up, it just didn’t feel like quite enough.
So I wrote a letter to her boss.
Who knows, maybe Ruth will win employee of the month or something? She should.
This post is part of a series on the cause of orphan care, adoption and social change that I hope to make you as passionate about as I am. You may want to start from the beginning if you’re just joining us.
We’ve talked about how different poverty is in the developing world when compared with the United States, but there are two more things that are critical to understand: first, the scope of poverty as expressed in US Dollars; and second, the foundation on which workable solutions will be built.
While I saw a lot of what I’ve been writing about while I traveled in Africa, I didn’t fully grasp the magnitude of it all until I came home and read The Hole in our Gospel, a gripping book by World Vision CEO Richard Stearns. (World Vision, by the way, is the largest non-profit focused on these issues in the entire world, with more international staff members than CARE, Save the Children and the US Agency for International Development combined.)
While it’s true that I didn’t agree with everything he wrote, Stearns’ point is addressed to the church and is deadly accurate – far too often, American Christians completely ignore the radical mandate for social change that we see in God’s words, perhaps best embodied in the command I often quote from Isaiah 1:17: “seek justice, encourage the oppressed, defend the cause of the fatherless.”
It was the statistics on poverty detailed in the book that grabbed me by the lapels and shook me.
Consider this: in the United States, the average income is $38,611 per person or $105 per day. And that’s just the average – we all know people with incomes that are a multiple of that amount.
Out of the 6.7 billion people we share this planet with:
As Stearns puts it, “brace yourself for the good news” – you’re rich!
If you make more than $25,000 per year, you are in the top 10% of the population. If you make $50,000 per year, you’re now wealthier than 99% of the world’s inhabitants.
That fact has the potential to dramatically change how we see the world.
Now, here’s the key question: what do we DO with this information? How do we build solutions that are sustainable and can permanently end poverty, rather than stick a band-aid on it?
As I’ve read and listened to a number of authoritative voices on this subject, I’ve noticed a few of them expressing a sentiment best summarized like this: ‘free market capitalism may actually be the source of many of these problems, and at best, is a direct hindrance to solving them.’
I could not disagree more.
Nobody says it quite that explicitly, but I see that sentiment in the chapter of Stearns’ book when he rightly criticizes empty materialism, but argues that the American Dream and the fight against poverty are diametrically opposed, and throws out the line “we need to put the American Dream to death.”
I see it in the incredible must-read book There Is No Me Without You, Melissa Fay Greene’s 2006 chronicle of the AIDS pandemic sweeping Ethiopia. Not only do a few inaccurate partisan potshots slip through, but an entire chapter is devoted to using some awful excesses on the part of pharmaceutical companies to paint the principles of capitalism with an extraordinarily broad brush.
I don’t know either of these talented authors personally, but I think the world of them. It’s my guess that in their righteous zeal to eliminate hunger and disease, they have been blinded to an incredible fact.
Free market capitalism and the “American Dream” have been among the greatest killers of poverty the world has ever known.
Remember, the free market is not a zero sum game. There isn’t a fixed amount of money in the world. Eliminating poverty will not happen by forcibly taking from some and giving it to another. The right kind of economic growth and investment is a “rising tide that lifts all boats.”
Rather than attacking the wealthy (or the systems that allow people to become wealthy), aren’t we better off convincing people that “being our brother and sister’s keeper” is not only our responsibility as fellow human beings, but is in our best interests as well? After all, the world’s wealthy would be better off if the number of customers that can afford goods and services tripled from 2 billion to 6 billion.
Let me put this another way: the growing gap between rich and poor is not evidence that free market capitalism is evil; rather, it’s a clear indicator that the opportunity of free enterprise has yet to penetrate deeply enough.
Philip Smith and Eric Thurman understand that fact implicitly and make it over and over again in another incredible must-read book, A Billion Bootstraps: Microcredit, Barefoot Banking and the Business Solution for Ending Poverty (referred to me by my friend Shanley Knox). They document the success of using tiny microcredit loans to help people achieve permanent self-sufficiency, permanently lifting their families out of poverty. The examples they share and the framework they’ve built is inspiring and hopeful.
So let’s review.
Let’s talk solutions!
Next Post: Is Adoption the Answer?
Photo Credit: Aaron and Cacey Klein in Ethiopia
