Internship Week Two (Describing my internship project)

January 11th, 2023

Today I will be going more in depth into the details of my internship project by answering the questions below.

• What will you be doing?

I think I already touched on this but I will be helping with the Pueblo Planning Project which uses money from Nathan Fletcher and the California Air Resource Board (CARB) to improve the Southeastern community of San Diego. Through participatory budgeting the Southeastern community chose to allocate the funds for "community beautification and way finding". GRID will be collaborating with other community based organizations (CBOs) to implement the project. A lot of the projects may take longer than expected because there are permits from the city that will need to be processed.

• What will the final product look like?

Most likely small projects all over Southeast San Diego. So far we are planning on installing "Solar Sculptures" in Millennial Tech Middle School's Earth Lab, planting trees with the Urban Collaborative Project, possibly refurbishing (adding a mural) to the side of a building at Grant Hill Park and adding bike racks to the park, possibly working with businesses in the Black Arts and Culture District (Murals and signs, "wayfinding"), and then another project is adding bike racks to the Mount Hope Community Garden.

• Which skills (academic, creative, technical) will you utilize and/or develop as you do the project.

Mostly Academic and some technical skills. A lot of emails, working with sheets, teams, all in collaboration with others. Lots of names, learning new information and remembering information.

• How will the project benefit the organization?

As a nonprofit GRID will benefit by working with the communities they most serve through solar (low income/underserved communities). It will hopefully boost the image of CBOs in the community and make people more eager to work with them in the future. GRID was tasked with this project anyway so our participation in it, makes it so employees of grid can spend more time on other things that GRID does.

Some photos from todays field trip to Primo energy. We met with the CEO Ned McMahon to discuss cost, uses of the "portable solar plant" (their are two types a "seed" meant for education and can't be outside 24/7 and "plant" which is meant to be outside and has to be installed with help from a professional) It was cool to see wind energy on a small scale. Both seed and plant models have accessibility to plug anything electrical and have 24/7 power because of batteries. Photo Credit: Abril Alejandra Garibay Garcia