My internship is with Protect Our Winters, which is based out of Pacific Palisades in the LA area. My bosses are named Barbara and Chris but Chris is currently away on business in Chicago.
I arrived in LA on Friday and spent the weekend getting the lay of the land before I started my internship on Monday. I wanted to make sure I knew how to get to work from my host house and what kinds of things are in the area that I could explore.
The view out my window…can’t complain!
My first day consisted of getting to know the company I am interning with, Protect Our Winters. POW is a non-profit organization that acts as a collective voice for the winter sports community speaking against climate change. I learned a little about them from when their founder, Jeremy Jones, came to Mountainfilm, but I had to get familiar with their various programs and initiatives such as Hot Planet, Cool Athletes.
The POW office
Hot Planet is a really cool program that is very unique to POW. They get their professional winter sports athletes such as Chris Davenport and Gretchen Blieler (!!!) to go to schools all over the country to give presentations about climate change. With their Hot Planet program they also have what they have called the Powder Grant, sponsored by North Face and Cliff Bar, that gives driven kids up to $5,000 that will go towards making some kind of change in their school or community.
Being part of the HOPE Club in Telluride, I thought this would be a great opportunity to get some funding for a (renewed) recycling program at our school and/or a compost bin. Other schools have done compost bins, elliptical bikes that create energy and other really cool stuff.
Anyway, POW also partnered with the National Resources Defense Council to make a report about the impact of climate change on the winter tourism industry, which was really interesting. They also have a movie called “Momenta” about coal-fired power plants that I got to watch, and I also read all of their handouts and infographics. After that, I got to work.
The first thing I did was learn how to mail-merge addresses from Excel to Word in order to print mailing labels that will go to different resorts around the United States. I also dug through the NRDC report and pulled out all the good facts and I started thinking of ways we can get the word out about the Hot Planet program and the Powder Grant (let me know if you have any ideas).
My desk
We also had a huge fiasco with a new printer we got on Tuesday. We needed to print like 1000 pages, so we wanted to get something heavy duty at Staples. The only problem is that Staples is lousy. We hauled the 60 lbs. printer all the way back to the office just to find out that the door on it wouldn’t shut and Staples wouldn’t come out to fix it even though we bought the on-site-repairs-included warranty. My boss, Barbara, was so frustrated because the thing barely fit in her car and we could barely carry the hulking thing. (It wasn’t so much that it was heavy but that it was so ponderous we couldn’t get our arms around it). We bought a new printer from Amazon and will never give our business to Staples again.
As for my housing, I am staying with Pinhead Director Sarah Holbrooke’s dear friend, Max Smith. He is super nice but unfortunately for me he left on Thursday to be with his family for the Fourth of July. Speaking of family, I was not left alone on the Fourth because my cousin lives about an hour away (though it took 3 hours in Fourth of July-LA traffic) and I got to do a bunch of fun stuff with her kids, who are my second cousins? cousins once removed? I can never remember. Overall it was very fun.
Me in a fire truck on Fourth of July
Me and my cousins on the back of the fire truck
Looking forward to another fun and eventful week out here in the Palisades!
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