Envisioning Our Future Workforce -What Will it Take to Improve the State of Clean Energy
What will Hawaii’s future clean energy workforce look like? How will we get there? Director of Sustainability at Kupu, Nicole Fisher shares the RISE fellow program which provides meaningful opportunities that move Hawaii to a more sustainable future in every sector, while mentoring and working alongside Hawaii’s current and future leaders. We’ll hear from Sarah, a Kupu-RISE fellow Alumni, and Kihaakeanu, a current fellow in their experiences.
Nicole Fisher- Kupu Director of Sustainability
Nicole Fisher is the Director of RISE, a core program of Kupu. She enjoys building a program that combines what she sees as the two most pressing issues in Hawaii: sustainability and workforce development. Her priority is to create exciting and meaningful opportunities that move Hawaii to a more sustainable future in every sector, while mentoring and working alongside Hawaii’s current and future leaders.
Hailing from Toronto, Canada, Nicole has spent many years living and working in Europe, Asia, and the Caribbean. Soon after graduating from the University of Western Ontario (BA in History), Nicole headed off to Thailand where she learned to love spicy food and worked for six years as a teacher and a project manager with non-governmental organizations. In Europe, Oxfam Netherlands hired her to help oversee their development projects in India. Back in Toronto, she worked for the high-end boutique travel company, Butterfield & Robinson, managing travel researchers spread across the globe. Once she met her husband-to-be they choose to move to Hawaii, marry and Nicole has spent the last few years focusing her career on sustainability as Hawaii moves towards positioning itself as a model for the world.
Sara Cobble- Kupu RISE fellow Alumni
Sara Cobble joined the Pono Home team in 2014 as a marketing fellow through the RISE program. Sara’s sustainability studies began as an undergraduate student at the University of New Mexico, continued when she studied abroad at Flinders University in Australia, and finally took her to the MA in Global Leadership and Sustainable Development program at Hawai’i Pacific University, where she served as the editor of the department’s “Spotlight on Sustainability” newsletter and studied an energy-saving competition and undergraduate students’ environmental literacy for her master’s thesis. Sara has a B.A. in print journalism and English from the University of New Mexico and is also a certified personal trainer and group fitness instructor. She hopes to use her journalism experience and her knowledge of sustainability and health and fitness to inspire people to live greener, happier, healthier lives. Sara is currently designing Pono Home educational and marketing materials.
Kihaakeanu Sai – Kupu RISE fellow
Kiha is currently in his senior year at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, majoring in sociology. He visited Cuba for a cultural exchange on behalf of Peace Child International. PCI is an organization that aims to aiding and identifying positions and directions for the world’s youth in sustainability. Cuba was chosen to be an excellent research opportunity to study their one of a kind sustainable system. Kiha witnessed a very unique community with different priorities than western culture mentalities. Kiha hopes to bring back what he learned to aid Hawaii’s mission to net zero energy by 2035. He was also able to guarantee a docking for the Hokulea in their Caribbean voyage in March 2016. Astronomy has always been a passion of Kiha’s which makes it that much more exciting to contribute to this project.
Kiha is in the process of conducting an energy and behavioral project for the Office of Sustainability at UH Manoa on behalf of Hawaii Energy. It involves researching different energy saving opportunities specifically located in the athletics department. Once identified, Kiha can then look into the behavioral aspect of sustainability. With his sociology background, Kiha hopes to study the different behaviors within the athletics department for the best possible approach to Hawaii’s problems, such as excess waste, and use of energy, fossil fuels, and water.
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The host for this episode was Jay Fidell.
The host for this episode was Jay Fidell.
The host for this episode was Jay Fidell.
