Solving for X

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SOLVING FOR

How does a cutting-edge biotech company respond to a pandemic? What does election security entail in the digital age? How can Silicon Valley improve equity? Is there a better way to manage our trash? The challenges and opportunities defining ]the first decades of the 21st century reflect an increasingly complex and interconnected world. They’re also the issues HWS graduates are primed to tackle. With no direct paths or pat solutions, asking the right questions is as important as knowing when — and how — to seize the moment. Here, nine alums unpack the interdisciplinary problems that keep them up at night and share the innovative thinking that’s shaping the future.

Fare Questions

Aloysee Heredia Jarmoszuk ’98 untangles the financial knots binding NYC taxi owners while mapping the future of urban transit.

BY ANDREW WICKENDEN ’09

There are 13,587 licensed yellow taxis operating in New York’s five boroughs. Licenses are tied to taxi medallions, which at the height of the market in 2014 were valued at more than $1 million apiece. Since the arrival of app-based services like Lyft and Uber, medallions’ worth has dropped to levels not seen in 20 years, putting some owners who bought at the top of the market in dire financial straits.

This was the most pressing problem facing the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission when Aloysee Heredia Jarmoszuk ’98 was confirmed as commissioner and chair in February of 2020. As head of the TLC, she leads the commission’s board and manages the municipal agency of 600 employees responsible for licensing and regulating yellow taxis, limousines, black cars, commuter vans and vehicles that contract with apps. In total, that’s more than 1,000 active businesses, 100,000 vehicles and 170,000 licensed drivers. After just a few weeks on the job, the pandemic had accelerated, the city shut down, commuting and tourism fell off, and the typical million-ridesper-day rate for New York for-hire transportation plummeted. As the streets emptied of fares, Heredia Jarmoszuk saw the mounting impact on TLC licensees. During a meeting with the mayor’s office about emergency response efforts, she pointed out the opportunity to “address two problems at once.”

“If the City was going to embark on meal deliveries for people who found themselves food vulnerable, I wanted to utilize our licensed drivers to get the meals out, to provide them supplemental income during the pandemic,” she says. Through the $39 million food delivery program she developed, TLC-licensed drivers transported 65 million meals to more than two million families between March and October of 2020.

With New York steadily reopening, Heredia Jarmoszuk sees ridership rebuilding, and while “the city’s transit systems are back to 40 percent of pre-pandemic days,” she says that “taxis are seeing an increase in market share. Things are getting better slowly.” She’s continuing long-term planning to address the TLC’s strategic goals, including improved accessibility, the electrification of the city’s fleet of vehicles, a regulatory review and technological innovation. Those goals, however, are only as viable as the owners’ and drivers’ ability to operate, which is dictated in part by their debt.

“Some have unmanageable debt, some are insolvent,” she explains, and assistance is more urgent than ever with the added burden of the pandemic. “I wake up every day thinking: how am I going to address this problem and help?” Initially, it was unclear what relief the City could provide, she says, because “generally speaking, you can’t use public money to resolve private debt.” There was also the question of “what we were solving for — how much money do we need? No one knows because these loans are all private transactions, and there’s no central repository for that information.”

Through the TLC driver resource center that opened in 2020, she and her team found indebted medallion owners “who wanted to restructure or refinance but didn’t have the down payment.” In response, the TLC developed a $65 million grant program that launched in September. Alongside the resource center, which offers “legal and financial assistance and representation,” Heredia Jarmoszuk says the grant program is providing medallion owners “the tools they need to refinance and reach more favorable terms.”

After a month in operation, the program has helped more than 170 applicants, owing a combined $52 million, to restructure and resettle their loans. Debt forgiveness so far amounts to nearly $22 million. Though it will take time — another 850 drivers have applied — she says the program “could yield close to $500 million in debt cancellation and forgiveness.” One way or another, she says, “I’m going to fix this problem, and we’re never going to find ourselves in this situation again.”

←PHOTO BY MICHAEL APPLETON WINTER 2022

Vote of Confidence

Connecticut’s elections director Ted Bromley ’95 looks back on an extraordinary election season in 2020 — and what the 2024 cycle has in store.

BY BETHANY SNYDER

The general election of 2020 was unlike any in modern history: plagued by disinformation, suffused with concerns about foreign interference — not to mention the global pandemic that made it difficult if not dangerous for voters to go to the polls. For Ted Bromley ’95, Director of Elections for the State of Connecticut, the onetwo punch of a uniquely polarizing presidential race and the COVID-19 crisis magnified the interrelated issues at play in today’s elections — security, information and access.

During the 2020 cycle, social distancing and stay-at-home orders meant Bromley and his staff of 11 ran most of the election remotely, relying on technology that, for all its benefits, can raise questions about security, directly and indirectly. “We’re defending against hackers, of course,” Bromley says, but in a world imperfectly connected by the internet and social media, “it also comes down to how you control malicious misinformation.”

For Bromley, who has spent two decades in state government, civic duty is indexed to the capacity to “promptly solve problems and help people…that’s the main goal, or should be the main goal, of any state or federal agency.” With state resources, federal support, guidance from social media companies and the University of Connecticut’s online voter center, he and his team monitored cyber threats, pushed back against unfounded concerns about fraud and led a public education campaign about electoral safety measures. Bromley says that despite the 2020 headwinds, his office ultimately administered “a problem-free election, one of the best that I’ve been involved in. I’m really proud of what Connecticut did.”

The election-season furor, however, hasn’t exactly abated. As an April report from the Pew Research Center notes, “partisan conflicts over election rules and procedures…have become increasingly contentious.” That’s likely to intensify as the Congressional redistricting process ramps up and new state and federal voting bills come under scrutiny. Misinformation doesn’t seem to be slowing down either. Looking toward the 2024 elections season, Bromley anticipates that he and his staff will once again be up against a steady stream of online propaganda designed to disrupt and undermine confidence in the process. His office continues to work closely with social media platforms and will soon launch a campaign to remind Connecticut’s 2.3 million eligible voters that the Secretary of State website offers secure, accurate and up-to-date election information. “If the general public doesn’t have faith in the result,” he says, “then it was all for naught.”

If trust in the process improves electoral security, encouraging more eligible voters to cast their ballots is an important line of defense. Bromley says that COVID-19, as disruptive as it was, provided the occasion to illustrate the practicality of making voting easier. “We want to make sure that everyone can participate,” he says. But in Connecticut absentee ballots are hard to get in nonpandemic times and early voting is not allowed, as he explains, because of the way the voting process is defined in the State Constitution. The pandemic forced elections managers to implement new technology and expand absentee voting, “things that we might not have otherwise done for years,” Bromley explains. “We pushed the envelope in terms of successfully running elections with more technology and more benefits for the general public, and we did it all in eight months leading up to the election.”

Considering the success of Connecticut’s 2020 elections, the state legislature has taken up bills to expand absentee and early voting; ultimately, the changes will require a state constitutional amendment, slated for next year’s ballot.

“You hear a lot of people say, ‘I hope we can get back to normal,’ meaning the norm two or three years ago,” Bromley says. “I hope ‘normal’ is using what we’ve learned going forward.”

A Shot in the Arm

Moderna Senior Vice President Shaun Ryan ’91 on managing risk and helping the company scale up to take on COVID-19.

BY ANDREW WICKENDEN ’09

Since early 2020, Shaun Ryan ’91 has been operating at warp speed. The senior vice president and deputy general counsel at Moderna says, “For better or worse, we’ve always been a lean legal team,” and when COVID-19 emerged, he was the lawyer responsible for working with governments and negotiating research and manufacturing contracts. Ryan says he wouldn’t want to relive the stresses of the pandemic or the whirlwind production of the vaccine, but he’s also “probably learned more in the past 20 months than I have in the past 20 years of practicing law.”

Moderna — founded in 2010 as ModeRNA Therapeutics — is a pioneer in messenger RNA biotech, still an emerging field in pharmaceutical research. The first successful mRNA transfection was recorded only 32 years ago, and with the pace of standard testing protocols, most mRNA drugs are in their nascency (most of Moderna’s products are either in Phase 1 trials or preclinical development). When the pandemic hit, Moderna was a clinical stage company, still about two years away from running large-scale Phase 3 studies, let alone distributing significant quantities of mRNA medicines.

For Moderna scientists, creating “the COVID-19 vaccine took a matter of days,” Ryan says, “because of the 10 years prior spent developing the mRNA platform.” But the company now had to account for preclinical research and large-scale clinical trials alike, while navigating an uncertain regulatory landscape, building out supply chain operations and expanding manufacturing capacity (and raising the capital to do so) — on top of coordinating with government agencies and negotiating international agreements. Going from a development-stage biotech operation to a global pharmaceutical company practically overnight introduced another order of complexity, Ryan says, “in part because we were doing all of these things simultaneously…all well before we knew whether the vaccine would even work. There wasn’t a lot of precedent.”

With a vaccine candidate in hand, Moderna researchers raced to start testing. In partnership with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, Moderna completed clinical trials and won FDA approval in just shy of a year. Meanwhile, Ryan and the company’s legal team were coordinating trial protocols, allocating materials, managing logistics and hashing out contract terms with government officials.

In some ways, the frenzy helped gauge the company’s priorities. Among other duties, in-house counsel manage risk, but “there was no way to manage for all the risks we were taking on,” Ryan says. “The most important part of managing a crisis of this scale is to figure out the two or three things you need to get right… and solve for those.”

With the pandemic raging, there wasn’t time to roleplay negotiations and game out different scenarios. Typical sticking points — like which party covers delivery costs — became minor concerns compared to issues like manufacturing capacity, the vaccine’s efficacy and liability.

“Administering hundreds of millions of doses of vaccine around the world, essentially simultaneously…the risk of liability is huge,” Ryan says. Convincing governments to accept a share was crucial. “In a normal situation, a company should, and would, be 100 percent liable for its

products. Here, we all ↑agreed that we needed to move fast, so we had to make sure we were all sharing that liability — that it wasn’t all borne by one small company.”

Ryan, who studied English at HWS, says “the introduction to a broad range of ideas and ideologies proved immensely useful” in thinking through the potential legal, ethical and financial consequences of Moderna’s decisions. “Learning how to read carefully, think critically and make cogent arguments has been invaluable for what I do now,” he says.

These days, Ryan still spends about half his time on COVID issues, including efforts to deliver vaccine to underserved parts of the world. “So far,” he says, “almost 50 million doses of Moderna vaccine have been delivered to [the international vaccine alliance] Gavi/ Covax for distribution to low and lowmiddle income countries, but we have a long way to go.”

And while getting beyond this pandemic remains a priority, Moderna is also readying for the next one. Until now, Ryan says, there’s been little political appetite for a dedicated pandemic response facility, which requires vast resources to maintain, possibly for decades, without being used. As governments and NGOs revisit the idea, Ryan has a seat at the (still virtual) table, helping his bureaucratic counterparts think through practical challenges “to ensure the world is better prepared for the next pandemic, whenever that may come.”

Trust the Process

Meggie Schmidt Hollinger ’10 is guiding Google’s efforts to create more equitable tech.

BY GRACE GALLAGHER ’10

Product design and development is iterative by nature. It’s how companies evaluate and respond to user needs. In the tech industry, underrepresented groups have historically been left out of that process, which is where the product inclusion department comes in. Product inclusion is devoted to recognizing and mitigating harms, and reducing stereotyping and misrepresentation in a given device, app or feature. And it starts with empathy.

“With technology, people can feel like it’s impersonal or that it’s cold, but there’s a lot of warmth and a lot of heart and a lot of goodwill in how it’s actually designed,” says Meggie Schmidt Hollinger ’10, a Senior Program Manager for Google Consumer Trust.

From YouTube to Search, Maps to Drive, Google’s products are used by billions of people with their own backgrounds, lived experiences, needs and expectations. To ensure “the solutions we’re coming up with for users’ journeys are meeting their needs,” Schmidt

Hollinger says, she and Google’s Product

Inclusion & Equity team work directly with users from underrepresented groups throughout the research and design process to prioritize

“the issues and opportunities that are important to them.” She and her colleagues are focused on

“systemically changing practices” so that the end product reflects this deep engagement with users.

Take the Google Pixel phone camera, or Duo, Google’s video calling platform: they effectively capture different skin tones thanks to Google’s close work with photography and film experts in the Black+ community. “What we’ve found is that [successful product inclusion] is about building with communities, not for them,” Schmidt Hollinger says.

Though she’s been at Google for eight years, she didn’t set out to work in Silicon Valley. She remembers the advice she got not long after she graduated during the Great Recession: “Don’t plan your career because you couldn’t possibly anticipate what will come. It will never turn out exactly as you expect.” (Even if she’d wanted a roadmap to her future, it would have been impossible because, at the time, her role at Google didn’t exist.)

The important thing, she says, is “going in pursuit of the things that compel you and that are interesting to you.” For her, that’s been the opportunities for innovation and creativity in the tech industry. She joined Google’s User Experience design team as a Program Manager in 2013, helping steer projects like the Google logo redesign and the launch of Google Assistant. The UX-focus remains vital to her approach to product inclusion — as is her art history degree: “It still stokes my intellectual curiosity and, if anything, it taught me not to put myself in boxes.”

And while she’s also compelled by the possibilities of the latest tech, Schmidt Hollinger says she’s energized most by the intelligence and the kindness of the people she works with to make Google’s products more inclusive. “What matters less to me is the exact number of launches we hit by the end of year; what matters more is the network of people we’re building who are invested in inclusion and equity issues,” she says. “To see what all of us are doing in 10 years and how that intersects — that’s truly what inspires me.”

When the Dam Breaks

Mayor, hydrologist and entrepreneur John Muhlfeld ’95 on community resilience in Big Sky Country.

BY NATALIA ST. LAWRENCE ’16

Montana’s rolling prairies and snowcapped peaks may conjure an image of the lone cowboy and the rugged individualism of the mythic American West. But John Muhlfeld ’95, a hydrologist and the mayor of the city of Whitefish, says it takes a collective effort to protect the state’s natural splendor — and its values.

In late 2016, an online terror campaign came to Whitefish. After a seasonal resident and infamous white supremacist went viral for his Nazi salute to celebrate the election of President Donald Trump, locals spoke out. Neo-Nazis retaliated with a flood of online harassment, sending hate messages and death threats to Jewish residents and other community members. Tensions escalated as white nationalist groups announced an armed rally in Whitefish on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

But the morning of the planned rally, Whitefish was instead filled with local counterdemonstrators. Muhlfeld, who has served as mayor since 2011, says the small city’s solidarity and its “swift,” “decisive” denunciation defused the situation. Beyond calling in law enforcement, the Whitefish community sought advice from the Anti-Defamation League, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Secure Community Network, and organized with the local anti-discrimination group Love Lives Here. Combatting hate “takes stepping forward to clearly articulate that those means of expression are not accepted and our community will stand up for what’s right for the dignity of all people,” Muhlfeld says.

In the following months, the city was singled out as “a national model of resistance” by Yahoo! News. The New York Times profiled Whitefish earlier this year in the article, “How a Small Town Silenced a Neo-Nazi Hate Campaign.” As local Rabbi Francine Green Roston told the Times, “If you asked [Whitefish leaders], ‘Do you think they’re going to show up?’ they were like, ‘Nah,’ but they had a full plan in place.”

For Muhlfeld, safeguarding the city from the most toxic human conduct extends to habitats around it. Beyond serving as Whitefish’s mayor, he is principal hydrologist and co-founder of River Design Group, a consulting firm specializing in river, floodplain and aquatic habitat restoration. RDG has executed some of the country’s largest dam removal projects and revitalized aquatic habitats that had been the sites of mining operations for centuries. The company has restored hundreds of miles of river and acres of wetlands, removed 45 hydropower facilities to allow safe fish passage and mimic natural conditions, but its services are still urgently needed to roll back stresses on the region’s aquatic ecosystems. With projects like the ongoing Klamath Basin restoration, the largest dam removal in U.S. history, Muhlfeld says RDG is “working under the guide that we don’t have time for natural processes to recover habitats for endangered species. It takes intervention.”

These challenges shape his vision for Whitefish as a place that can sustain the wild beauty that draws people to visit and live in western Montana. Surrounded by mountains, lakes and rivers, it’s a gateway to Glacier National Park and one of the fastest growing regions in the state.

Under Muhlfeld’s leadership, Whitefish has adopted a sustainable tourism management plan that prioritizes environmental protection and preservation of the city’s idyllic character. Recently, he helped secure a 3,000-acre land conservation easement to protect Haskill Basin watershed; for more than a century, Muhlfeld explains, the basin had been the primary source of Whitefish’s drinking water, based on “little more than a handshake deal with the landowner, the largest private timber company in Montana.” He says through “hard work and partnerships with state, non-profit and federal agencies,” the city has formalized the easement and is now in the process of building The Whitefish Trail, a 50-mile system that will encircle the city and Whitefish Lake.

For Muhlfeld, these efforts to protect the great outdoors encapsulate what makes Montana so special: the will to preserve open spaces and manage monumental problems as a community.

Welcome to Pittsburgh

Delvina Smith Morrow ’09, a senior director with the Pittsburgh Penguins, on the power of community partnerships and the hockey team’s investment in the region’s future.

BY ANDREW WICKENDEN ‘09

In the late 1950s, entire blocks of Pittsburgh’s Lower Hill District were leveled to make way for the Civic Arena. The urban renewal project promised jobs, even as it displaced small businesses and thousands of residents from the majority Black neighborhood. Built for the local opera company, the arena was most notably the home of the Pittsburgh Penguins. After the hockey team moved in 2010, the venue was torn down and the remaining parcel of land became a vector of disappointment.

How does a city move forward without leaving its residents behind? Pittsburgh is facing the question again with the 28-acre, $1 billion Lower Hill Redevelopment, which broke ground this September. The project is a collaboration between the Penguins, the city and local developers to transform the Civic Arena site, now a parking lot, into a bustling “destination.” Whether it can be done sustainably and equitably depends on the longevity of partnerships, programs and investments like those managed by Delvina Smith Morrow ’09, the Penguins’ Senior Director for Strategic Community Initiatives and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

“Anyone who knows Pittsburgh knows Mr. Rogers and the importance of being a good neighbor,” Morrow says. “That’s how we’re approaching this development: how can we be a good neighbor to the community?”

There are new buildings and outdoor spaces planned, places to “live, work, play and celebrate,” but at the heart of the redevelopment is an “economic engine for the benefit of local residents,” Morrow says. Since joining the Penguins in 2019, she has helped craft a community impact plan that will see the redevelopment’s anchor tenant, First National Bank, reinvest $230 million in the Hill District. Meanwhile, she directed a $100,000 “rec to tech” investment, retrofitting a community center as an innovative tech lab for local students. In June, the First Source Center opened in the heart of the neighborhood, offering job training, financial literacy support and wealth building advice, as well as administrative resources for entrepreneurs, from copy machines to conference space. It’s “a one-stop shop for workforce development opportunities,” Morrow says, “whether they’re tied to the Lower Hill project or not.” Through these kinds of initiatives, she says the Lower Hill project will establish a durable economic model for the neighborhood, the city and the region.

Still, the legacy of the Civic Arena looms large for Hill District residents, and reactions so far range from optimistic to wary. “The community wants to hold the Penguins and the development team accountable,” Morrow explains, “and we are 100 percent on board.” When she joined the Penguins, she started attending community events, asking the residents and organizations in the team’s back yard what they need. She says that even with the new redevelopment’s emphasis on equity issues — from homeownership to cultural preservation to supporting minority- and womenowned businesses — it’s the personal relationships that will ultimately determine “the narrative of what the Penguins are trying to do.”

A native New Yorker, Morrow says Pittsburgh’s “neighborly” air was never more apparent than during the pandemic. As COVID forced the NHL and the redevelopment to pause, she directed the Penguins’ local response, coordinating with elected officials and police precincts, local organizations and neighbors, to deliver food and supplies across the city. She says it’s this kind of direct engagement that shows Pittsburgh residents “that the Penguins are not just talking heads — we’re here, we’re part of the community.”

“Anyone who knows Pittsburgh knows Mr. Rogers and the importance of being a good neighbor. That’s how we’re approaching this development: how can we be a good neighbor to the community?”

Beyond the Beltway

NBC Political News Reporter Teaganne Finn ’16 on her search for stories that reveal the consequences of D.C. decisions.

BY NATALIA ST. LAWRENCE ’16

Stories at the crux of policy and people: for Teaganne Finn ’16, that’s where the news comes alive. In the age of so-called “fake news,” when trust in the media has become a partisan issue and some outlets favor clickbait over substance, the NBC political reporter says good journalism demands “taking the big picture and going down to the local level,” now more than ever.

As Gallup noted in October, “Americans’ confidence in the media to report the news fairly, accurately and fully has been persistently low for over a decade and shows no signs of improving, as Republicans’ and Democrats’ trust moves in opposite directions.” That gap is the result of a range of socio-historical factors, and hardly the domain of a sole journalist to resolve, but Finn says that for reporters covering the Capitol and national politics, there is a risk of getting “stuck in a D.C. bubble,” with all its attendant drama. “Covering local news gives you an appreciation for real people and real stories,” she says.

As a senior at HWS, she reported on children of migrant workers in the Finger Lakes region, highlighting the ways local communities are impacted by federal legislation, like the farm bill that lawmakers take up every five years. After earning her master’s in public affairs and journalism from American

University, Finn joined Bloomberg News as a D.C.-based agricultural reporter, which found her in the newsroom during the passage of the 2018 farm bill. That moment, and the memory of her student reporting, underscored the scope and significance of the stories that flow through the Capital Beltway.

“I write stories that flip-flop all the time, between a bill being $3 billion versus $3.5 trillion, or whatever it is. Those are big figures,” Finn says, “but I know that they’re actually affecting people in towns all over, like Geneva.”

One of the most important stories of Finn’s early career put her in school lunchrooms, observing what was at stake in a Congressional rewrite of the child nutrition bill — from the nutritional value of school meals to the practice of “lunch shaming.” (As Finn explained in a 2019 Bloomberg article, “‘Lunch shaming’…is where students unable to pay for a school lunch are denied food, given alternate meals or otherwise stigmatized…to get their parents to pay up.”) Ultimately, she says, “It came back to this idea: parents just want to feed their kids.”

Her reporting this fall has centered on the unfolding Congressional backand-forth over the debt limit and infrastructure spending, but she’s also covered the journeys of Haitian immigrants and the fallout of Texas’ recent law banning abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. Whatever the story, she says meeting readers where they are helps build trust and minimize chances of misinterpretation. By prioritizing clarity and context, and “sticking to the script” — the who, what, when, where and why — she hopes to avoid amplifying political theater and scandal-mongering. As she says, “You can’t sensationalize something that isn’t there.”

]Return to Senegal

Nick Pilgrim ’00 follows through on a promise made during a semester abroad more than 20 years ago.

BY ANDREW WICKENDEN ’09 Nick Pilgrim ’00 chose Senegal as an economics major — that is, he their academic potential and wanted to understand firsthand the impacts of globalization and international monetary policies on a developing country. And he did. During that semester abroad, he was “exposed to staggering levels of poverty.” In the streets of cities like Dakar and St. Louis, Pilgrim recalls seeing children as young as five begging for money and food. Known as talibé, these children are often entrusted by their parents to a marabout, a religious leader charged with guiding the children’s educational and moral upbringing. Away from their parents, however, the children are “all too often” subject to exploitation, Pilgrim says. He made a promise then that one day he would return, to do what he could to expand academic opportunities for Senegalese children. The idea stayed with him as he graduated from HWS, went to law school at the University of Chicago, and embarked on a successful legal career — including several years as an assistant U.S. attorney and, more recently, as a senior trial attorney with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. In October 2020, despite the pandemic, Pilgrim made good on his promise. With help from his Senegalese “brother” Bassirou Diallo, whom he befriended while studying abroad, Pilgrim opened a computer learning center in Dakar where children receive free courses in math, English, coding and general computer literacy. The center is the first under the banner of Africa Codes, the nonprofit Pilgrim founded to offer children “the tools and resources they need to maximize to escape from poverty.” Though he always wanted to be a lawyer, Pilgrim took to heart the words of Charles Hamilton Houston — Thurgood Marshall’s mentor and the architect of the NAACP’s successful legal challenge to segregation — who believed that a good lawyer should be a “social engineer.” For Pilgrim, that means “someone who works to construct a better, more just, more equal society.” “The liberal arts education I received taught me that if we want to experience long-term economic development and to eliminate income and wealth inequality, we must make a dedicated, long-term investment in human capital development,” Pilgrim says. And investing in education was the most obvious place to start “because a society’s development is ultimately determined by the trajectory of its youth.” As the world shifts to increasingly tech-driven economies, he hopes to close the “digital divide” for Senegalese children. In April 2021, Africa Codes opened a second computer learning center in the village of Kounkané and partnered with a school in Dakar on a new computer lab. This fall, the nonprofit launched a campaign for its newest project: building dormitories and classrooms to provide talibé children with English, science, math and coding classes. Pilgrim says he’s grateful that in less than a year, Africa Codes has had such a positive impact, reaching more than 100 children in high-poverty communities. “I am also grateful to HWS for offering a robust study abroad program,” he adds. “But for my formative trip to Senegal, Africa Codes would never have existed. So, in many ways, the children and students who study at our academic centers are beneficiaries of HWS’ decision to expose its students to different countries and cultures by offering study abroad opportunities.”

LEARN MORE at africacodes.org or contact Pilgrim at nickpilgrim20@hotmail.com.

Jacob Fox ’16 in one of the composting bays at Closed Loop Systems in Geneva.

Renew the Soil, Revive the Earth

With Closed Loop Systems, Jacob Fox ’16 is turning organic waste into a regenerative solution.

BY ANDREW WICKENDEN ’09

Topsoil is in trouble. Jacob Fox ’16 estimates that between farming and the built environment, “we have degraded over 60 percent of our global topsoil. And there are not many ways of replenishing that.” Beyond its utility for growing crops, the top 12 inches of earth is the site of organic activity with incalculable ecological benefits — filtering air and water, managing pollution and flooding, sequestering carbon and regulating the climate. As the World Wildlife Fund reports, sustainable land use can alleviate the impacts of agriculture and livestock, “preventing soil degradation and erosion and the loss of valuable land to desertification.” Fox, cofounder and CEO of Geneva, N.Y.-based Closed Loop Systems (CLS), says the challenge that comes with many sustainable solutions “is that they are only partial solutions.”

“Imagine,” he says, “if one day you threw 100 percent of your garbage in one bin, and that bin was taken to a local composting facility and turned into soil.” That soil, in turn, could be used to retain stormwater or aid in bioremediation at superfund and brown-field sites. This is the regenerative cycle that Fox envisioned when he realized that food waste is not only “the single largest piece of the municipal waste stream” but “a very valuable resource.”

Fox first started investigating waste solutions as a public policy major and sociology minor at HWS. He connected with John Hicks ’59, who owns Organix Green Industries, a large-scale vermiculture facility in nearby Seneca Castle, N.Y., where vegetable waste from local farms is broken down by worms and microbes into rich, fertile humus. After graduation — and a few months in Europe for professional soccer trials — Fox joined the company and soon realized he could apply the vermicomposting model to any food waste and “tie it all together in a holistic ‘closed loop system.’”

In 2017, Fox pitched the City of Geneva on a facility to help solve food waste challenges and divert waste from landfills. By late 2018, he had founded CLS with Hicks and Jim and Mike Nardozzi, who own Nardozzi Paving and Construction in Geneva. Together, the group has experience with vermicomposting as well as construction expertise and logistical capacity.

Fox sees Geneva as an ideal location to “disrupt” the waste management industry. Between the abundance of local farms and the large landfills within a 15-mile radius, CLS can offer soil and liquid amendments to farmers, mitigate the environmental impact of landfills, and work with local researchers to study soil health, carbon sequestration, bioremediation and the Soil Food Web.

After securing nearly $500,000 through state and county grants on behalf of the city, CLS opened the Geneva Resource Recovery Park in early 2021. The new facility is a waste management hub, where for a small annual fee, city and town residents can bring food and yard waste for vermicomposting. Soon CLS will expand its services with a recycling and disposal drop-off area. Metal, construction and demolition debris, bottles and cans, cardboard, landfill materials — the company plans to take it all. With a “pay-as-you-throw” system, residents only pay for the garbage they produce, giving Genevans “the opportunity to save money and divert their waste,” Fox says. A few months later, CLS customers can take home the compost that their organic waste has produced.

With an eye toward statewide growth, the company has already secured a grant to build a facility in Cortland, and Fox says they plan to build seven more by 2024. In addition to replicating the Geneva model in other communities, CLS has designed an agricultural model that would “handle manure and other farm waste, while also providing soil regeneration for the farm,” Fox explains. Similar facilities are planned for industrial clients with large waste streams, such as food processors, breweries and livestock operations. CLS also has designs to handle biodegradable waste from dining facilities and grounds maintenance at institutions like hospitals and colleges.

For Fox, the more attention paid to what’s going on beneath our feet, the better. “Soil carbon sequestration is our best chance to solve climate change,” he says. “All of our policies currently revolve around renewable energy, and that’s a problem. Solar, wind, industrial carbon capture and other technocratic climate solutions won’t solve our soil erosion and water pollution problems. We can have all the energy we want, but we will be doomed if our soil is gone.”

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