Archives: People

Yash is a member of Team Flauna Coenose, a passionate group of BTech students from Jaipur, India. Members of this team are engineering majors who hold a collective vision of a greener, more equitable planet. Arnav’s innovative thinking has consistently pushed the boundaries of sustainability, encouraging them to explore creative solutions as a team. Yash’s unwavering commitment to eco-conscious practices remind his teammates that small actions can have large impacts. Vinit’s exceptional problem-solving skills enable the trio to turn ideas into actionable solutions. In their free time, Yash has a keen interest in sports, reading, and writing. Arnav Goyal is passionate about animation and graphics, while Vinit Kumar Sharma excels in writing poetry.

What are five words that describe your PGC experience?

Ecstasy, Bliss, Cognizance, Revolutionize, and Sustainable. 

What was the most memorable aspect of PGC 2023 for you?

It was the first time, we participated in an international competition so the thrill and the hunger to change the world to create a brighter future was the most memorable one. What struck to me the most was the collective passion and commitment of the participants. The PGC challenges inspired the people from different background, culture and country who shared a same purpose — addressing Climate Mitigation.

Climate Action Project: Swap2Save

“Swap2Save” is a project led by Yash Joshi with his team, Flauna Coenose. Yash is a dedicated advocate for sustainable fashion based in Jaipur, India. Their innovative approach tackles the detrimental impacts of fast fashion waste through a simple yet impactful principle: reusing. Yash’s project encourages people to pass on their old clothes to those in need, fostering a sense of community and addressing the pressing issue of waste production in the fast fashion industry. By fostering a culture of sharing, Swap2Save not only aids individuals but also contributes to the broader goal of reducing environmental harm caused by excessive clothing waste.

CAP Presentation Video: here

Will is a Project Manager at Turning Green and works primarily on the Conscious Campus side of Turning Green with a focus on program leadership, fundraising and conducting grant research for the organization. He graduated from Colorado College in 2022 where he studied History, Environmental Issues, and Spanish. He became a lead intern with Turning Green during his first summer out of college, where he helped write and edit Project Green Challenge’s overviews and challenges. Will entered Turning Green’s Fellowship program in September of 2022 and continued to help run Project Green Challenge as well as the PGC Campus Representatives program. He currently volunteers with the Environmental Peacebuilding Association in his free time.

Cari is a clothesmaker (2000-2022) and salonniere (2012-2022), 119 salon dinners after apprenticing at Chez Panisse), writer and educator who received her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology and Film from UC Berkeley in 2001. She has a keen interest in cultural identity and otherness throughout her graduate work. Her M.A. thesis from School of Oriental and African Studies in London was entitled “Hollywood in Britain: America as Other” whilst her doctoral thesis “Jamaican Art Worlds: Encounters, Transformations, Metamorphoses” also analyzed the creation, documentation and consumption of identity. Cari’s expertise ranges from the arts (Guggenheim, MOMA, Stux Gallery, Collezione Peggy Guggenheim), food + wine and film worlds (having worked as an assistant to B. Ruby Rich, Tom Luddy /Telluride Film Festival, Peter Sellars), a practicing installation artist (De Young Museum, YBCA and ArtHotel Sacramento) and to her most recent work as an anthropologist at Apple.

Since 2017, Cari has worked on projects that ranged from the Steve Jobs Theater, Apple Park and Visitors Center for Apple University (2017), on Angela Ahrendts Today at Apple team, curating programming for Apple Union Square as well as other global retail initiatives, and most recently on Lisa Jackson’s Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives team to establish a tech and creativity grants pilot. Cari also creative directs a variety of galas and salons including She-Can Global in SF and NYC and Boston Review Magazine in the Bay Area, Glide Foundation in SF, and was a Visiting Artist at Oakland-based Creative Growth. She is on the boards of National Novel Writing Month and Creative Growth, and is a professor at California College of the Arts where she teaches “Design Ethnography” + “Since Feeling is First: the Search for Desire and Eros through Culture” in their MFA Design Program. She also teaches “Creating Built Worlds” each Spring in the Anthropology Department at San Jose State University. She is working as Chief of Staff to Alice Waters, focusing on the implementation of the Alice Waters Institute at UC Davis which is part of a larger 10- campus focus on procurement and school-supported agriculture. Cari’s most recent research focuses on the ambivalent role our earliest childhood food memories play in our relationship to what and when, with whom and where, how and why we eat.

Ella is a rising 2nd year at Grinnell College majoring in Sociology with a concentration in Environmental Studies. Learning about environmental justice as a form of social justice has fundamentally changed the way she views the world, and she is so excited to apply those learnings to the work of Turning Green. She is originally from Colorado and is a big advocate for collaborative thinking. In her free time, Ella can be found laying in the sun, eating bagels, and reading creative nonfiction.

Chandler is a graduate of Howard University in Washington DC where she majored in biology. She then went on to complete her doctorate in Biology at UC San Diego. She studied how our ever changing climate affects the interactions of native and invasive plant species in Southern California. While at UCSD, she found a passion for equity and inclusion efforts and published a paper entitled “Without inclusion, diversity initiatives may not be enough.” in Science. Currently, Chandler is a doctoral lecturer in the African American Studies and Environmental Studies, and Culture, Art, and Technology departments at UCSD, at Scripps Institute of Oceanography and has taught in the Biology department at Howard University. She is also a professional artist and tarot card reader.