Whether it’s a feature for a media outlet or a post meant to highlight a brand, good stories need interesting people. Here are a few of my favorites:
Victoria Lai
If you’re feeling a bit stuck and looking for a little inspiration work-wise, read this profile of Victoria Lai for UrbanFamily magazine. I talked with Victoria in summer 2015 just as her business, Ice Cream Jubilee, was hitting its one-year anniversary. She’s an incredibly accomplished person who, after having found her “dream job” at the Department of Homeland Security, realized her true calling lay in the joys of making, and sharing, ice cream. See more of my brand stories here.
Abdishakur Mohamoud
National Geographic has funded several small projects meant to expand electricity access around the world, often led by people from Westernized countries who developed an interest in the issue for one reason or another. Those stories are inspiring, but none is like that of Qorax, a solar solutions company based in Somalia co-founded by a man who knows energy poverty intimately. Reading about Abdishakur Mohamoud’s transition from having zero electricity to speaking four languages and bringing sustainable power to his homeland might make you seriously reevaluate what is possible in your own life. See more of my energy stories here.
Louis Michaud
What I liked about talking with scientist Louis Michaud is how low-key he was about an extremely unconventional idea: making tornadoes on purpose. Michaud matter-of-factly described to me how he went about fabricating twisters in order to harness their energy. Okay, sure, it might be more likely that we’ll see fusion power before we see this deployed widely, but the world needs offbeat minds to create solutions that will one day seem unremarkable.
Shazia Khan
I’m not often moved to tears when reporting energy stories, but interviewing the founders of EcoEnergyFinance was an exception. The story of this endeavor to bring clean energy to rural Pakistan is two (nonromantic) love stories packed into one: first, the way co-founders Shazia Khan and Jeremy Higgs found each other from across the globe; and second, the moving connection with Khan’s father, who came to the U.S. with very little and eventually built an extremely successful real estate business in Albany, N.Y. If I had this story to do again, I’d bring a videographer who could capture Khan’s emotion and Higgs’s response to it.
Miriam Szubin
Szubin spends her days fostering what so many of us search for in our fractured, overly digital worlds: Real community. At Washington D.C.’s Jewish Community Center, she has found amazing ways to connect people from all walks of life, and to build a parenting and early childhood program that includes non-parents. I was charmed by her openness, positivity, and energy.
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