Lina Guerra used to spend her nights pouring drinks for passengers at Boston’s Logan Airport. The menial job left the 36-year-old single mother of a newborn feeling like she hadn’t realized the economic potential her parents gifted her when they left Colombia in the late 1980s.
During her prolonged hunt for a salaried position, Guerra came across an ad that seemed too perfect. “There’s no way I’ll get it,” she thought. Despite possessing the required language skills, she hesitated, right up to the deadline, before applying. A few weeks later, Guerra received a call to come in for an interview.
The position? A medical interpreter fellowship with Found in Translation, a nonprofit that trains low-income, bilingual immigrant women and places them in jobs at prestigious hospitals in the Boston area. Launched by Maria Vertkin (a Russian immigrant herself) in 2011, the organization has recruited 158 participants that collectively speak about a dozen languages, including Spanish, Haitian Creole, Arabic and Portuguese.
During more than 100 hours of training, fellows learn the rigors of medical interpreting. “You have to be very accurate,” Guerra says. A loose, informal translation could lead to the wrong diagnosis. When a patient describes a stomachache, for example, the interpreter must possess the vocabulary, in both languages, to translate “tummy,” “belly,” “stomach” or “abdomen” to convey the right connotation. On top of that, Guerra adds, interpreters must know the slang for each culture.
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Interpreters act as cultural brokers. During one prep class, for instance, trainees debated the appropriate gender for a gynecologist or urologist. (Arabic speakers believed patients should see a physician of the same gender; those of Spanish heritage believed doing so would imply homosexuality.)
They also learn to advocate, and in a few rare instances, interrupt on the patient’s behalf. “There’s implicit bias and prejudice,” Vertkin says. “It’s the interpreter’s job to say, ‘Wait a minute, are there other options? You’re only offering the cheapest metal filling.’ That might be because of who the patient is and the assumption that they’re poor. The interpreter has the obligation then to intervene.”
With the new commander-in-chief calling for a border wall, mass deportations and an unprecedented Muslim travel ban, times are tough for immigrants like Guerra, who arrived in this country at age 8. She has a message for President Trump: “Please know in your heart that the majority of non-English speaking people have an even greater desire to be American than some people that were born in this country. They are so proud to be in America, regardless of the struggles that they are currently facing,” Guerra says, pleading, “Give them a chance.”
Employed by a translation agency, Guerra makes her living speaking for foreigners. Perhaps it’s time we all starting listening to what she has to say.
MORE: What to Do During ICE Stops
Tag: Boston
This Woman’s Novel Approach to Poverty Relief Is a Game-Changer
It was a 344-page book that set Sherry Riva on the path to launching Compass Working Capital, a nonprofit that provides financial services to struggling families, in 2005. “Assets and the Poor,” by Michael Sherraden, argued that poverty is a problem of wealth, not just income, and its message resonated with Riva, who had already logged a decade working with low-income women and their families.
“If you think income is the problem, then your solutions are income-based,” says the Boston-based entrepreneur. But social safety nets like welfare, food stamps and housing subsidies don’t help families build wealth. In fact, many programs geared toward those with low incomes essentially forbid them to have money in the bank, keeping them from saving, Riva says.
This new way of thinking about poverty became the blueprint for Compass Working Capital. The organization’s mission is to help struggling families build the savings and the skills they need to climb out of poverty. Compass’s programs combine financial education and coaching, with incentives for saving. The asset-based approach works: 60 percent of families in the flagship program have increased their incomes by an average of $11,000 a year, and 81 percent have seen their savings rise to an average of $2,500.
In a country where 62 percent of people count less than $1,000 in savings, that’s an impressive achievement.
Riva has been preparing for this work her whole life. Raised as a Catholic, it wasn’t until she got to college that she started to learn about the rich tradition of social justice work among the faithful. As an undergraduate at Princeton University, Riva worked with the philosopher and social critic Cornel West, and read up on the Catholic feminist activist Dorothy Day. Later, she studied American Catholics’ role in welfare reform at Trinity College in Dublin. “My own spiritual journey has been about tapping into the pursuit of social justice as a core part of my faith,” says Riva.
After earning graduate degrees from Trinity and the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, Riva relocated to Seattle, where she worked in direct-service organizations, including as the director of a women’s shelter.
“It was a really entrepreneurial job, because it was so under-resourced,” she says of running the multisite shelter. “That experience positioned me well, but I had no idea what it would be like to start an organization.” That’s not to say Riva has regrets. “I’ve really enjoyed being an entrepreneur. Sometimes it’s exhausting, but fundamentally it is a creative, problem-solving, gritty, passionate, give-it-your-all kind of endeavor.”
Compass began with a group of 10 families at a charter school in Roxbury, Mass. “We saw early on that families were engaged,” Riva says. The initial results showed not only that the program was helping them achieve important financial goals, but that it also was changing their mindsets.
Today, Compass has the distinction of being the first nonprofit to create an asset-building model, for a federal housing initiative known as the Family Self-Sufficiency (FSS) program. Public housing mandates that families pay 30 percent of their income toward rent. FSS, meanwhile, allows — and encourages — those in subsidized housing to put any extra money they make into a savings account rather than upping their rent contributions. Compass’s program combines that savings incentive with financial coaching to help families accumulate wealth and assets.
It’s a model that can help families move out of poverty and build savings, which in turn helps them become homeowners and send their kids to college. “The FSS program has provided us with a really big market to do it,” says Riva. Across the U.S., 5 million families live in subsidized housing. Right now, Compass is sharing its model and experience with partners around the country. “Our hope is to help shape policy,” says Riva, who’s currently completing a Social Impact Fellowship with GLG, a membership-based learning platform, to help grow her company’s reach. Through her work with GLG, Riva has focused on plans for national expansion, positioning her organization for growth, and developing data security infrastructure to support key constituencies.
Learn more about the GLG Social Impact Fellowship, including information on applying.
Riva points to one Compass client as a prime example of that vision in action. Vilmarys Cintron was raising her daughters in the very same public housing complex she’d grown up in. But after graduating from the Compass program, she was able to buy her own home and start a daycare business. “The day that Vilmarys moved out of public housing, we received several calls from other people in her development asking, ‘What’s the program that Vilmarys did, and how can I get in?’” Riva says.
If Riva and Compass succeed in spreading their successful model around the country, there will no doubt be millions more stories like Cintron’s.
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GLG Social Impact is an initiative of GLG to advance learning and decision-making among distinguished nonprofit and social enterprise leaders. The GLG Social Impact Fellowship provides learning resources to a select group of nonprofits and social enterprises, at no cost.
This Anti-Poverty Initiative Was Born in a Hospital Waiting Room
Dr. Michael Hole, a senior resident in pediatrics at Boston Medical Center (BMC), was used to hearing unusual questions from patients, but this mother’s was truly a first: “Can the clinic help me get my taxes done?”
Lacking an accountant’s expertise, Hole referred her to a free tax preparer. But when she returned for her newborn’s next appointment, the mom told Hole she’d taken two buses and a train across town, only to find the place closed. She tried once more the following week, but this time, she didn’t bring the right documents. Fed up, she forked over $400 to a local H&R Block — a huge chunk of her negligible four-digit annual earnings.
The woman’s experience wasn’t an aberration either, says Dr. Lucy Marcil, another BMC pediatric resident. “There were 27 free tax sites in Boston at the time, but they were rarely accessible to families. It might be in a church basement or be open from only 4 to 7 p.m. on a Tuesday. Others have a five-hour-long line of people,” she says.
Frustrated by the situation low-income families confront, Hole and Marcil cofounded StreetCred in 2015 to help working parents complete their annual tax filing. Their unique solution? Set up free prep stations at a place where parents show up regularly: In their case, the waiting room. While the doctor’s doing a check-up, a volunteer is using a W-2 and other records to fill out the parents’ Form 1040. (Often, the volunteers are employees elsewhere in the hospital, like a pharmacist or IT staff member, who receive tax-prep training from local partners.) Last year, StreetCred’s service returned more than $400,000 to approximately 200 Boston families.
Most of those savings come from applying the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), the federal government’s largest and arguably most effective anti-poverty initiative. Started by a Republican president in 1975 and given its current shape by Bill Clinton in 1993, the EITC is one of the few programs in Washington to enjoy bipartisan support. Essentially, working families making less than $53,500 can file a “negative tax return,” drawing a check from the IRS worth up to $6,242.
Unlike other entitlements that limit what a recipient can buy (think: WIC and SNAP’s restrictions to certain food items), the EITC’s payback is up to parents’ discretion. “A lot of what they spend money on is major expenses hanging over their head: credit card debt, a roof falling in or a car repair,” Marcil says. “Conceptually, the idea is that you take away financial insecurity and poverty and instability. Those things take up a ton of mental space, and removing some of that frees them up to be more actively engaged: reading to their kids or providing consistent schedules, rather than having to run off to a third job.” With what’s left over, Marcil adds, “they can buy fruits and vegetables for the baby, a winter coat or a high chair — all the things that we think of as necessities to raise a child that are really luxuries to them.”
There’s just one problem: One in five eligible low-income Americans isn’t actually taking the credit. By situating the refund in a medical context, StreetCred has the chance to significantly boost participation rates. For one, 92.4 percent of kids see a pediatrician at least once a year, giving the doctor — a professional that commands parental trust — a chance to ask whether they know about the credit, just like they ask about guns, swimming pools and low windows. (Not that the EITC isn’t within their purview too: It’s been shown to improve maternal and infant health by, for instance, upping birth weight and decreasing maternal smoking.)
Next tax season, which runs from January 23 through April 18, StreetCred will test out their model at three new locations: Boston Children’s Hospital, South End Community Health Center and a homeless shelter. They’ll be looking to see how many families they can reach, the error rates on returns, the refund’s impact on the family and, finally, the way the service changes the family’s relationship with their healthcare provider. And they’ll be piloting another set of services: With their tax form filled out, the volunteer can check whether the family qualifies for other social services they might be missing out on, like Medicaid or a Section 8 housing voucher.
Beginning with Boston, doctors’ checkups are getting much more comprehensive, and families are clearly benefiting from it.
Homepage photo of Lucy Marcil by Matthew Morris/Boston Medical Center
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Correction: An earlier version of this story stated that StreetCred helps parents fill out their Form 1099; they actually assist with filling out Form 1040. NationSwell regrets the error.
How an Ambitious Program Is Empowering Boston’s Women to Stand Up for Equal Pay
To eliminate the gender gap in paychecks, women must know how to ask for higher salaries comparable to their male colleagues, the proponents of a Boston initiative argue.
AAUW Work Smart, a partnership between the nonprofit American Association of University Women (AAUW) and the Mayor’s Office of Women’s Advancement, offers free salary-negotiation workshops to any woman who lives or works in Boston. At libraries, YWCAs and community centers, volunteer professionals coach participants on coping with their anxiety to effectively ask for a pay bump. Since the program’s 2015 launch, AAUW has hosted 72 workshops from downtown to Dorchester, reaching 1,700 women in the process. And that’s only a small slice of the goal: Over the next four years, AAUW Work Smart intends to reach 85,000, or half of Boston’s working women.
“If I’m working on the same project with the same job and same responsibilities, and I’m getting 64 percent less money than [my male colleague] does, that psychologically brings you down. It doesn’t empower you as an employee. It doesn’t motivate you to do the best of your ability,” says Kristina Desir, AAUW Work Smart’s program manager. Through the two-hour interactive workshops, “we’re trying to get women to get pay equity on their own.”
Nationally, women make 80 cents for every dollar a man makes. Over the course of a year, that adds up to a $10,470 difference, on average, for full-time, year-round workers. In Boston, as in the rest of the country, the racial gap compounds the problem. There, Asian women make only 77 cents for every dollar a white male takes home; black women, 63 cents; and Hispanic women, 52 cents.
Megan Costello, executive director of the Office of Women’s Advancement, doesn’t view those numbers simply as a feminist matter. The wage gap affects the city’s entire economy, she explains. ”If the majority of our city is underpaid and not paid what they’re worth, that not only hurts them as individuals but it hurts their families, their communities, and it hurts the entire city of Boston,” she told WBUR, the local public radio station. “So this is the right thing to do, but it is also important to the economic vitality of the city.”
To improve the stats, Desir’s workshops dispel the typical anxieties: “The fear of employers saying no, the fear of missing out on a job.” First, she focuses on teaching women to know their worth, to quantify the value they bring to a company. The instructors — many of whom come from Morgan Stanley — then demonstrate how to find industry-wide standards for salaries and benefits online. They also walk the women through different negotiation strategies, like asking for a better title even without a pay raise. After that, in pairs, the women practice role-playing as a manager and an employee asking for more pay.
There’s been some encouraging anecdotal results from Work Smart so far — one woman, for example, negotiated a 40 percent raise — and the model is expanding nationally, most recently to Washington, D.C., and San Jose and Long Beach, Calif. But Desir cautions that workshops alone won’t eliminate the gender gap in salaries. She hopes that, by teaching women how to advocate for themselves, the culture at large will start to shift and that one day, the burden won’t fall on women to demand what they rightly deserve.
Packing the Substitute Teacher Pool With Outside Experts, Charging Cars By the Mile (Not By the Gallon) and More
What Can Substitute Teachers Do for City Schools? CityLab
The average teacher misses 9.4 days each school year. Total it up, and by high school graduation, a student will have spent six months of class-time with a substitute teacher. Rather than having a sub plod through an unfamiliar lesson plan or just distribute worksheets, a new model at two Boston schools places local experts in urban farming, animation, robotics, puppetry — you name it — at the blackboard to teach about their field.
Taxing Drivers by the Mile, Instead of at the Pump, The Denver Post
Hybrid and electric vehicles may be a boon to the atmosphere, but they’ve caused some headaches for government administrators, namely, how to pay for bridge and road repairs. Prius drivers travel farther on a tank — functionally discounting their share of the gas tax — so the Colorado Department of Transportation is testing the feasibility of a fairer standard: charging for each mile driven instead.
Can Hypothermia Save Gunshot Victims? The New Yorker
Most people who suffer a traumatic gunshot wound die within an hour. Having lost so much blood, their heart can no longer circulate what’s left. A new procedure at University of Maryland’s Shock Trauma Center, near Baltimore, buys more time by putting the body on ice. When a victim is wheeled in, doctors fill the body with freezing saline, pausing heartbeats and giving them just enough time to sew up the wounds.
The Visionary That’s Getting Everyone to the Table to Talk About Social Good
This February, on the exact same day, two governors from two very different states — Nikki Haley, a Republican in South Carolina, and Dan Malloy, a Democrat in Connecticut — both announced social impact bonds to promote family care: one for low-income moms, the other for parents struggling with substance abuse. Both of these bonds (also known as “pay for success”) deployed private dollars to fund the scaling of a social program. If the project succeeds in meeting specific, predesigned metrics, the private backers will profit from their investment; if not, taxpayers don’t owe a penny more. Behind both of these innovative, cross-sector partnerships was Tracy Palandjian, CEO of Social Finance, a nonprofit intermediary between all the parties, who helped bring the “pay for success” model to the United States after seeing it first implemented in England in 2010.
NationSwell spoke with Palandjian by phone from Boston about the daily obstacles and excitements that come with rethinking how American social services can reach more people in need.
What’s the best advice you have ever been given on leadership?
I have two. The first one is an African proverb: “If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go with others.” Just because one has a great idea and one could often accomplish a lot more, going at it alone is often insufficient if you really want to deliver a movement. That’s hugely evident in our work here. Imagine these very funky public-private nonprofit partnerships with so many stakeholders with very divergent motivations. What motivates a private investor? A sitting governor or mayor? The executive directors of these classic human service providers? We have everyone sit around a table to articulate a common goal — in this case, delivering results to our communities — when they have often conflicting frameworks and very different languages they speak in and very different world-views. Bringing them together around a very common goal among very uncommon stakeholders is something that we have found, yes, it’s challenging, but if we can rally this forth, we see enduring, powerful results coming out of those partnerships.
By way of background for my other one: I didn’t grow up in this country. I’m Chinese, and I grew up in Hong Kong. My grandfather whom I was very close to, his favorite quote was (translated to English): “Distance tests the strength of forces, time tests the hearts of men.” It really is a message about patience. A lot of things take time, and the people who can stay steadfast on that vision could achieve the most. My grandfather was born in 1903 in China. He took his courageous wife — my grandmother — and, at that point, four children, and literally fled the Second Wold War on foot, by boat and by train out of China into Hong Kong and then to Taiwan ultimately. He was a chemical engineer, completely self-taught. He left everything behind when he fled. Along the way, he lost two children. After they made it to safety, he started all over again. He made consumer batteries and completely rebuilt himself, his family and his business. I always think about their lives and what they were able to overcome and what they were able to accomplish. Sometimes, we take three steps backward to take five steps forward.
What’s your favorite book of all time?
One of my favorite books, which I’m proud to say is the namesake of our eldest daughter: a Chinese classic, “Tao Te Ching.” It’s just so poetic and so poignant about how one should live. And it’s full of these non-intuitive sentences like, “It is through being effortless that you can achieve the most.”
What innovations in your field are you most excited about right now?
Taking a step back, social impact bonds are probably the latest and the most recent comer to this broader investing landscape. I agree there’s been a lot of hype, but the reason why people are excited about it is that the impact is so direct. When our investors get their money back and then some, it’s because somebody’s life has been improved. This very articulated, metric-driven all-around life improvement, whether it’s recidivism or job attainment or education attainment or improved health outcomes, these are the metrics of each of our deals. Someone’s life improvement is the source of the return back to the investor, and that connection is really powerful. While the field started off in criminal justice (and still a lot of projects are focused on reducing recidivism), we’re excited to see there are a lot of projects in early education, in early childhood, in health and in workforce development.
How do you try to inspire others?
I just try to be who I am. I believe, as a person, I’m best when I’m aligned as a human being and I’m 100 percent authentic. I don’t try to say something because it will inspire others. I don’t try to do something because, well, that’s what I believe a good leader should do. I try to model good behavior for my colleagues. I’m not perfect, I have lots of limitations. I try to be a good parent and model good behavior for our children. I feel very strongly about this; I feel like there are too many lessons and advice that people give. People just need to be authentic.
What’s your proudest accomplishment?
I am probably most proud of the fact that I really think that I understand two cultures perfectly well. Obviously, I grew up in my own [Chinese] culture. My whole family’s still in that part of the world. You never forget your own culture and your native language. But I also think I’ve worked in America long enough and I’ve worked with enough different sectors and different kinds of people that I really understand how this country and this culture works, too. I think that’s just a huge skill to be able to be empathetic, to be able to step into the shoes of others. I think it’s a really important skill to have, especially for our work, which requires us to talk across sectors and work across disciplines.
What don’t most people know about you that they should?
I’m an artist at heart. That’s what I did as a young kid, all throughout high school and college, I painted a lot, I drew a lot, I experimented with all kinds of mediums. I miss that part of my life. I haven’t done much since I graduated from college. Now, I watch my kids do it, and it makes me very happy.
To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
The Room Full of Recliners That’s Saving the Lives of Drug Addicts, An Investment in the Poor That Pays Off and More
Overwhelmed by Overdoses, Clinic Offers a Room for Highs, Boston Globe
The number one cause of death among Boston’s homeless? Opioid use. Overdoses are such a common occurrence that they disrupt workers’ daily tasks at Boston Healthcare for the Homeless Program. In response, the organization is making a drastic, controversial move: opening a room where addicts can come down from their highs while under medical supervision. Some claim that it’s a plan that will simply enable users; others, including the Boston Public Health Commission and the Massachusetts Society of Addiction Medicine, believe it’s an effective way to get the drug pandemic under control and reduce the number of fatalities.
Free Money Lifts People out of Poverty, and That’s an Investment That Pays for Itself, Tech Insider
Despite America’s vast wealth, more than one in five children grow up in poverty in this country. While many believe that giving the less-fortunate money increases laziness, North Carolina discovered that Cherokee tribe members receiving up to $6,000 a year from casino revenue gave parents the ability to save money and pay bills on time — all the while continuing to work the same amount as they previously did. Not only that, their children experienced a reduction in mental health problems, fewer behavioral problems and improved performance in school.
Crowdsourcing the Future of a Social Movement, Stanford Social Innovation Review
You’ve probably heard the popular saying, There’s no “I” in team. While running a major crowdsourcing campaign, funders and nonprofit leaders in the LGBTQ community learned just how powerful collaboration is at maintaining social progress. More than 14,000 ideas were collected from residents of all 50 states, creating a vast data set about LGBTQ issues — something that’s cost prohibitive for one organization to source, but that will help guide the entire movement for years to come.
Why Youthful Indiscretions Shouldn’t Result in Jail Sentences, How to Save Babies Born with Opioid Addictions and More
A Prosecutor’s Vision For A Better Justice System, TED
Adam Foss, a prosecutor with the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office in Boston, recently asked a group of TED participants how many had ever drank underage, tried an illegal drug, shoplifted or gotten into a physical fight. While viewed by most as youthful indiscretions, these same offenses often land black and brown youth in criminal court, viewed as being dangerous to society. Which is why Foss is using prosecutorial discretion to dismiss minor cases that aren’t worthy of a criminal record.
Tiny Opioid Patients Need Help Easing Into Life, Kaiser Health News and NPR
In this country, addiction to heroin and prescription painkillers like hydrocodone, oxycodone or morphine continues to rise, even afflicting new moms. During pregnancy, these mothers must decide between getting clean and risking a miscarriage or delivering a baby that’s likely to experience drug withdrawal. With about 21,000 infants suffering from withdrawal each year, doctors in Rhode Island, nurses in Connecticut, researchers in Pennsylvania and public health officials in Ohio are all working on solutions to help these new families.
Website Seeks to Make Government Data Easier to Sift Through, New York Times
Just because the government releases endless pages of data to the public doesn’t mean it’s easy to turn those statistics into something that you can actually comprehend and use. DataUSA, an open source brainchild coming from the M.I.T. Media Lab, organizes and visualizes the information, presenting it in charts, graphs and written synopses. Thanks to this project, instead of just hearing a statistic of how many people in Flint, Mich., live in poverty, for example, you can see it visually represented on a map.
The Van That’s Saving the Lives of Homeless Kids, a Better Way to Govern Locally and More
Mobile Clinic Serves California’s Growing Homeless Youth Population, KQED News
In the Golden State, the number of school-age homeless children has jumped by a third in just three short years. Unstable living environments wreak havoc on these youngsters, resulting in increased risk of chronic illness, mental health disorders and trauma. Doctors aboard the Teen Health Van provide free medical (both physical and mental), nutritional and substance abuse care to hundreds of uninsured and homeless youth.
In Snow Removal, a Model for Change, Governing
City officials in St. Paul, Minn., set out to improve how snow was removed from roadways, but in the process, found a smarter method of governing. The unique approach (which should be replicated nationwide) involved teams consisting of outside consultants, working pro bono, and members of the Department of Public Works, who could provide internal perspectives. (Normally, consultants work on their own to create recommendations.) The result of this public-private pairing? More effective snow removal, and innovative, restructuring changes that DPW employees embraced.
When Families Travel for Medical Care, Strangers Open Their Homes — and Arms, Stat News
Health insurance can help defray the costs of medical expenses, but little financial assistance is available for housing expenses incurred by patients and their families when they must receive life-saving treatments at hospitals far from their homes. Since 1983, the nonprofit Hospitality Homes has been connecting out-of-towners (most are low-income) with host families providing a free place to stay in Boston, where the average hotel room costs more than $100 each night.
How Does One Man Reduce U.S. Dependency on Oil? He Starts with Trucks and Vans
When Clay Siegert is stuck in traffic behind a box truck, he doesn’t groan at the jumbo-sized gas-guzzler: He sees it as an opportunity.
As vice-president and co-founder of XL Hybrids, a Massachusetts-based company that converts commercial fleets to hybrid vehicles, Siegert is out to prove that the business of cargo transport doesn’t have to be a dirty one. XL Hybrids retrofits vans, minibuses and trucks by installing hybrid electric powertrains, so that every time a driver hits the brakes, a bit of kinetic energy is converted into valuable electricity. It’s a winning formula: The vehicles use 25 percent less gasoline, lowering carbon dioxide emissions while also reducing their company’s bottom line.
“When I see a truck going down the road with hybrid technology, I see less emissions, less oil being imported into the country,” Siegert says. “It’s more than just a truck or a van that drives somewhere. It’s those trucks that are going to drive hundreds of miles, maybe just that day. That adds up.”
Siegert spent more than a decade in various positions — at a firm trading energy commodities on the financial markets, a deregulated energy supplier offering a green alternatives to buying from local utilities and a trivia game manufacturer — before returning to school. While earning a master’s degree in supply chain management from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Siegert was introduced to Tod Hynes, a lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, who’d developed several wind energy projects. The pair hit it off and decided to collaborate on a new venture, though at the time, they weren’t exactly sure what.
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“Tod was looking for what was next in his career, and we both had an interest in clean technology and clean energy,” Siegert recalls. “Just looking at all the different industries, we kept thinking about all the millions of vehicles on the roads. We crystallized the idea that if you come up with a fuel-efficient technology that’s cost-effective, you could have a big impact on the amount of petroleum and gasoline used in North America and, eventually, globally.”
Because the big automakers (Ford, General Motors, Chrysler) already had huge research and development departments with decades of experience improving fuel efficiency, consumer cars were out of the question. Commercial fleets, on the other hand, were a largely untapped market.
XL Hybrids inked their first major deal with Coca-Cola, the world’s largest beverage company. Though Siegert was ecstatic a big brand signed on, he was also nervous about translating an idea that looked good “on whiteboards, spreadsheets and technical designs” into a reality. “Now you’ve gotta go out and deliver the results,” he thought. Luckily, the company did. Retrofits of 175 Coca-Cola vans hit the roads last year, cutting fuel usage by 20 percent, saving 6,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide and at least $15,000 over each vehicle’s 10-year lifespan.
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Coke is buying more, including 70 this year. XL Hybrids has since brought on PepsiCo, FedEx and the City of Boston as customers. Last October, all the vehicles it had retrofitted reached a collective 4 million miles in service. Already, that means the company saved 800 barrels of oil and over 350 metric tons of carbon dioxide exhaust.
Today, Siegert is tasked with brokering those sales and overseeing daily production. In addition to the official titles printed on his business card, his colleagues know him to be a “strategic planner,” a “supply chain optimizer” and a “sales accelerator.” Above all, he prizes efficiency and affordability. That’s why XL Hybrids skips adding any fancy frills during its retrofits; the company’s technology is available for under $10,000 without government subsidies — a first. “We remove costs wherever we can,” he says. “One of the core tenets of our business, for whatever product [Tod and I] came up with, was that we wanted it to be cost-effective and have a good payback.”
While that sounds like pretty standard business advice, it’s missing from a large swath of the clean energy sector, where customers are expected to pay a premium to get something green. At XL Hybrids, Siegert wants to prove that sustainability and profit can be two sides of the same coin. He’s splicing corporate interests and ecological concerns, in a word, into a hybrid. After all, when it comes to miles per gallon, what’s good for the environment is also good for investors.
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