What does Kickstarter have to do with clean energy, anaerobic digestion, and sustainable farming?
A lot, as it turns out. Carrie Marketos the company’s Vice President of Community Strategy will join a roundtable discussion about creating and funding solutions for sustainability and clean energy at Basilica Hudson’s Green Energy Fair on Sunday.
Marketos was Kickstarter’s first employee. The company that allows creators to pitch and fund their projects was in its early stages when Marketos departed to become part of the Obama Administration’s Office of Digital Strategy.
She returned to the company in 2017 as Vice President of Community Strategy. On Sunday, she’ll be part of a panel discussion called “Game Changers: How Regenerative Businesses Can Shift Power Back To The People And Planet” as part of Basilica Hudson’s Green Energy Fair.
We spoke to Marketos just after she arrived in Hudson on Friday afternoon and asked her why exactly Kickstarter was involved in a panel on clean energy and sustainability:
Our charter states that we have a commitment to do as much as we can to be as green as possible and that includes recycling and reducing waste in the office but also helping creators make better choices. So we’ve launched an environmental impact guide about how not to do all these little things where you end up with a lot of waste at the end of your project.
But the plan is broader in a couple of ways. We own the product and anyone who engages with it has to to see it so the visibility of the message of sustainability is extraordinary.
We also are a very attractive platform for projects to do with clean energy and green projects. We find that projects of that nature have a lot of success on our platform. Those ideas are coming to Kickstarter and blossoming. Creatives are usually on the edge of moving the conversation forward on things like this.
For example one of our first projects was a group of activists from Louisiana who ran a campaign to build money for these droids to measure the oil spill there. So we have these projects and we’re creating a community that supports them. That is bleeding edge. We’re an R & D lab for these concepts emerging out of these communities and we’re building a wide audience of support for them.
Kickstarter is nothing if not a show of solidarity for something. Big companies don’t want people to have access to that sort of information. How much oil was spilled? But these people got it by getting the funding. It’s evidence that these things matter to people and it is very hard to ignore when we’re building very vibrant communities around them.
Basilica Green Energy Fair takes place Sunday at Basilica Hudson from 12- 5 PM and is free. Learn more about the panel discussions here.
