Scalable Climate Responses

Deonna Anderson
Senior Editor at GreenBiz Group
Deonna Anderson is an award-winning journalist and senior editor at GreenBiz. Previously, she was the Surdna reporting fellow at YES! Magazine and the 2017-2018 Equitable Cities Fellow for Next City. Anderson is an alumna of UC Davis and the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.

Keith Kinch
Co-founder of BlocPower
Keith Kinch co-founded BlocPower and serves as its General Manager. In the summer of 2016, Kinch led the Solarize Brownsville campaign, bringing together community organizations, local residents and a solar installation partner to outfit more than 200 homes with solar panels. The project demonstrated solar power’s potential impact in low-to-moderate-income communities and remains one of the largest solar projects in New York history. In 2017, Kinch oversaw the Community Retrofit NYC, a partnership between the Mayor’s Office of Sustainability and the Department of Housing Preservation and Development. The project produced over 500 retrofits for multi-family buildings. In 2019, BlocPower partnered with Con Edison and NYSERDA to launch “Green the Bronx,” a campaign that helped hundreds of multi-family building owners convert their fossil fuel heating systems to clean heating and cooling systems. The partnership provided engineering, project management, customer education, financing, and no money down equipment leases for building owners. This year, Kinch oversaw a $37 million contract with the New York City Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice to develop a 1,000+ person climate tech jobs program focused on neighborhoods with high levels of gun violence — placing over 600 individuals in training cohorts within the first two months. Kinch is leading BlocPower’s historic partnership with Ithaca, New York to decarbonize all of the city’s buildings.
 

Sasha Srivastava
Executive Director for New Partners Community Solar Corp.
Sasha Srivastava is an experienced professional both in sustainability and finance. Caring about both people and the environment, she is focused on solutions that simultaneously address environmental problems and justice issues, particularly among highly vulnerable populations. Having concentrated on climate solutions that tackle mitigation and adaptation concurrently, Srivastava holds a Master of Science degree from Johns Hopkins University in Energy Policy and Climate, and a Bachelor of Arts degree in International Management from Pepperdine University. Before she joined New Partners Community Solar Corp., Srivastava designed and carried out original research on secondary positive impacts of participation in low-income solar programs. She keeps New Partners focused on the environmental and social policies that form the basis of its work. 
 

Olivia Collins
Senior Director of Programs at the CLEO Institute
Olivia Collins is the Senior Director of Programs at the CLEO Institute. Born and raised in rural Canada, Collins lived in many places before settling in Miami in 2017. She has over 15 years of experience in the environmental field, from natural building to corporate social responsibility to grassroots community engagement. As Senior Director of Programs, Collins oversees and executes most of CLEO’s outreach programs and collaborations. She also provides climate training to help people understand how the climate crisis impacts our daily lives and what steps we can take to better prepare for future challenges.