ALL EPISODES
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Energy Excelerator is a startup program for companies developing renewable energy solutions. Before she co-founded it, Dawn Lippert worked with Hawaii's state government to set a goal of 100% renewable energy by 2045--and now she is ensuring they can meet that goal. She tells me what they look for in an entrepreneur, and how they plan to meet Hawaii's goal.
DAWN LIPPERT
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Jen Glantz attended so many weddings, she went into debt, then wrote a book about it called 'All My Friends are Engaged.' On a whim, Jen thought she might make a little money out of attending weddings and posted an ad on craigslist offering her services as a bridesmaid. She tells me she got 100s of responses, leading her to turn it into a full-time business. I invited her to tell us about her experience starting a business from scratch with no business experience, what it takes to get a book published, and what she is observing about the modern relationship from inside the wedding planning process.
JEN GLANTZ
Nancy Santiago Negrón is the Chief External Affairs officer at the Opportunity Finance Network--an organization that brings together lending institutions that "benefit low-income, low-wealth, and other disadvantaged people and communities across the nation." She shares her vision for OFN along with her work at the Women's Bureau at the Department of Labor to improve the well-being of women who serve and have served in the military.
NANCY SANTIAGO NEGRÓN
Simine Vazire, an associate professor of psychology at UC Davis, shares why the methods and practices in psychological science need to change–and what she and her organization, the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science–are doing about it.
Simine Vazire
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It's not enough to just have a great idea and people will follow you. So Nancy Duarte and Patti Sanchez work with leaders to communicate their transformational ideas to drive real change–such as Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth" presentation and Michael Pollan's call to eat mostly plants. And now they have written a book for leaders called "Illuminate. Ignite change through speeches, stories, ceremonies and symbols." Duarte and Sanchez also run Duarte Inc., the largest communications company in Silicon Valley, and the 5th largest women-owned business in the area and they are partners to top brands around the world.
PATTI SANCHEZ & NANCY DUARTE
The latest in the sharing economy--Splacer is the so-called "Airbnb" for event spaces. Maria and her team are working to create more access to unique spaces for everything from corporate meetings to photo shoots. Founded in Israel, they are now in New York and San Francisco--and soon Los Angeles. Their co-founder and Chief Operating Officer Maria Molland, has also helped build businesses for Yahoo!, Thompson Reuters, eBay and Fab.
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Only about a quarter of computer professionals are women--and that's actually down from 1990 when it was 36%. Girls Who Code is a non-profit organization whose mission is to change all that by closing the gender gap in computer science. Founded in 2012 by Reshma Saujani, the program is on track to educate more than 40,000 girls in all 50 states this year. Her goal: one million women in computer science by 2020. And we'll need them. In less than 10 years, the United States will have 1.7 million jobs for engineers and computing professionals. Without girls, we will literally not have enough qualified people to fill these jobs.
RESHMA SAUJANI
Pentagon and related budgets will account for more than half of all federal discretionary spending--almost $600 billion in 2015. That's roughly the size of the next seven largest military budgets around the world, combined--while non-defense related spending continues to shrink. How much are we getting for those billions? And more to the point, what are we losing? Jennifer Harris, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and an advisor to Hillary Clinton during her tenure in the State Dept-- has co-authored a book called "War by Other Means. Geoeconomics and Statecraft" proposing new prescriptions for how the government spends our money.
JENNIFER HARRIS
Award-winning historian Dr. Amanda Foreman argues that a history that pushes women to the margins is an untruth that must be challenged. To this end, she created the four-part documentary series "The Ascent of Woman" with the BBC (and available now on Netflix). It is the first documentary to present the history of women from the dawn of civilization to the modern day.
DR. AMANDA FOREMAN
An unsettling power struggle over women's sports is trending at universities across the nation resulting in a decline of women's coaches from 90% in 1973 to 43% today. That's according to a recent report from "Reveal," the radio show from the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX. They found that Title IX--which was enacted in 1972 to eliminate gender discrimination from educational institutions--may have had some unintended consequences for female coaches. Annie Brown shares what she learned when she investigated this story. Listen to our conversation on iTunes or NPR One.
ANNIE BROWN