October 26, 2007 | Volume 4, Issue 2
Like Drinking From a Fire Hose
GTECH Treads New Paths on Risky Ground
The Heinz School Review recently sat down with Heinz School alumni and founders of GTECH: Growth Through Energy & Community Health, Matthew Ciccone, Andrew Butcher, and Chris Koch, to discuss their experience founding a non-profit social enterprise following the completion of their Heinz School degree. The interview illuminates the details of reclaiming polluted urban land, creating opportunities to train a ‘green collar’ workforce, and producing crops for clean burning biofuels.
Heinz School Review:
How did your project get started?
Matthew Ciccone:
We were in Rebecca Flora’s class, ”Sustainable Community Development”, two springs ago. Chris Koch, Nate Wildfire, Lori Gaido and I were in that class. Lori, Chris and I were all on the same project team and our project was looking at ways to deal with vacant property and ways to use vacant land to produce some sort of income.
HSR:
And that was mainly public land?
Matthew Ciccone:
Well, it was a short project. A lot of those questions never got answered, or even asked – we didn’t realize they were questions. Coming out of that project, Nate, Lori, and Chris took the idea and made it more specific in scope. They started to take those questions and say, “What’s the problem here and where is it?” And Nate, through a connection with the City of Pittsburgh, turned it into a full-length semester-long project at Heinz.
HSR:
Could you tell us about your competition in L.A.?
Matthew Ciccone:
The competition was the Hines-Urban Land Institute (ULI) Urban Design Competition. This is an annual graduate school competition with teams of four to five graduate students per university representing at least three schools. Our group included myself, Andrew, Chris, an MBA student, Darren Sabom, and a Master of Urban Design (MUD) student, Jake Day.
HSR:
And what did you have to do?
Matthew Ciccone:
We had ten days to propose a development, planning, and financial scheme for a project in Los Angeles. There were over a hundred twenty teams participating. We went to Los Angeles and came back and talked about development and planning and all those factors that are part of the site. We realized that the one central theme that could tie it together was an environmental factor, and [the GTECH strategy] was what we proposed. Vacant land was a big problem; alternative energy was a big problem. This was a way to combine that. The top four teams in the competition go to the second round. We came in fifth place.
HSR:
So that was the same type of strategy as GTECH?
Matthew Ciccone:
Right. We didn’t know anything about it at the time. Concurrent with the beginning of that project we started an independent study here at Heinz – a half-semester project with Chris, Andrew and I. Our advisor was Denise Rousseau.
Andrew Butcher:
The seed of the project was planted in Rebecca Flora’s class in the spring of 2006. In the fall of 2006, Nate, Lori, and Chris identified the client in the Mayor’s office. The Mayor had a vacant land working group as a part of the Redd Up campaign. So the Redd Up campaign and the Mayor’s office contracted CMU for a systems project to develop a green strategy for vacant land management. The website for the systems project contains the policy recommendations and the community handbook that was produced. One of the strategies that was identified as an interesting model for green community enterprise was the idea of growing alternative energy crops on vacant land to remediate soil, produce biofuel, and feed stock.
HSR:
So that’s where we are now. You’re working for GTECH. What was the initial move from the competition to your independent study to graduating and now doing GTECH?
Andrew Butcher:
I think the question you’re asking is “How did you get from there to here”? The systems project finished with our policy recommendations on the website
HSR:
So your independent study was to develop the framework?
Andrew Butcher:
Correct.
Matthew Ciccone:
It was proposed in two parts. First: here’s this crazy idea, is there anything to this? And then once we evaluated it, we proposed taking this into an actual entrepreneurial venture.
HSR:
And you did this over the course of a semester?
Andrew Butcher:
Actually, it was a little bit more than half a semester. The ULI project took us till about mid- February. Then in March we really started drilling into the Brassica Project, which evolved into the Phyto Project.
HSR:
What’s the Phyto Project?
Matthew Ciccone:
So the Brassica Project is a reference to a category of plants like canola. Brassica plants are well known because a huge number of plants fall under this name. These types of plants comprised a large number of the plants we were looking at which pull contaminants out of the ground. But the plant we kept on talking about over and over again, sunflowers, aren’t that kind of plant. So we renamed the project.
HSR:
Why phyto?
Andrew Butcher:
Phyto emerged as we asked – “What are we really doing here?” We are remediating land through the process of phytoremediation, so this became the Phyto Project. Ultimately that was a limiting framework for us to address the three primary areas of impact that we were looking at: remediation/land reclamation, energy production, and job creation. So phytoremediation wasn’t doing it.
As we continued to develop the model, GTECH emerged as Growth Through Energy and Community Health: a broad but specific enough framework for us to build upon. And so with the completion of the independent study in about April of 2007, we incorporated as a Pennsylvania nonprofit and started putting together proposals for two different pilot projects.
The two pilot projects exist on two scales. The first scale is that of brownfields. The other is a community scale for vacant lots. The brownfield project started through an interdisciplinary “Robot City” class in which Chris Koch participated. This class was jointly taught by Bob Gradeck, Luis Rico-Gutierrez, and Red Whittaker. The thing that came out of that class was Chris’ work on the green side of things. Chris started working very directly with Red Whittaker of the Field Robotics Center (FRC).
As a result, the team started meeting with Red and ultimately started working hand-in-hand with Field Robotics to implement our project and bring together some of the other partnerships to make the project happen. Those partners involved FRC, Regional Industrial Development Center (RIDC), Ernst Conservation Seeds, which is a large-scale international conservation seed producer, Winona Farms, Meadville Land Services, Bidwell Training – some of this is on our website. These are the partnerships that the Brownfield Project was able to initiate. We consequentially planted seven acres of switchgrass and oats, five hundred hybrid poplar trees, and an acre and a half of sunflowers.
The Brownfields Project started in April/May and we continued to work with Field Robotics and the RIDC. The community scale projects initiated in late May in a partnership with ELDI – East Liberty Development Incorporated. It was enabled with a Sprout Fund Engage award, a “Lots of Green Award.”
HSR:
A “Lots of Green Award?”
Matthew Ciccone:
The Sprout Fund has been trying to support a “green” program in the city of Pittsburgh. Their first effort to do this was through supporting the Pittsburgh Green Forum, which occurred last October, concurrent with our systems project. The systems project helped make that event happen. It was a two-day event that brought in organizations from Baltimore and Philadelphia to look at green strategies for vacant lots.
HSR:
Is this an annual event?
Matthew Ciccone:
It was a one-time community meeting, just a two-day event. The Sprout Fund gave a grant to help make that forum happen. They packaged the results of that forum into a report. After our systems report, the Sprout Fund said, “This is really cool. We like what we see here. There needs to be an organization and support for someone to try some program that greens vacant lots in the city in a progressive way. To enable that to happen we are going to announce our new “Engage program.” I think it’s called Engage Pittsburgh.
Andrew Butcher:
It’s a class of grant that they have.
Matthew Ciccone:
Most of the Sprout Fund grants are very small. You apply to them and they fund start-up programs. We applied for that grant as a partnership between our organization and ELDI. That grant allows for our project in the East End to happen.
HSR:
And where is that?
Matthew Ciccone:
There’s not just one vacant property – there are three groups of vacant properties. There’s a group across the street from Peabody High School. Peabody High School is on Beatty Street and East Liberty Boulevard. That property used to be six houses, so there are six plots of land in the community. That vacant land has been there since I don’t know when – and we’re trying to reclaim that land through this project. And all the rest of the projects we’re working on are the same kind of idea.
HSR:
Can you go through the steps of prepping the site and harvesting? Step-by-step, what is involved? I am guessing it is different from the brownfield sites to the community sites?
Andrew Butcher:
The types of sites are different and there are components that are different. But the process is going to be the same. It is also important to note that a lot of what is going on right now, a lot of the hands-on work on the farming/agricultural side of things, is information that we are learning as we go – and from what I understand about farming, which is okay. Most farmers end up doing that anyway. When you look at the team, virtually none of us have a farming or an agricultural background. And so the process that we are discovering and learning, whether brownfield or vacant land, is that you have to understand your site specifications. It is important to do soil sampling. You have to do a resource evaluation: Where is your water? What is your drainage? What is your elevation?
HSR:
Can we stop and have you break down each one of those? A soil sample, how does that actually work? Do you pull from different parts and then you send it to a lab?
Matthew Ciccone:
Exactly, yes.
Andrew Butcher:
We do that in partnership with the Penn State Cooperative Extension and Allegheny County.
HSR:
How did you get hooked up and how did you learn these things?
Andrew Butcher:
Many of the contacts and people that we met that are helping us learn as we go are people we met through the systems project. One of the primary sources of information for how to manage vacant land in the city resides at the Penn State Cooperative Extension.
HSR:
So soil, water…
Andrew Butcher:
You do site specification, evaluations, soil sampling, resource identification, and a survey if needed. Every site is different – even the sites in East Liberty. Some sites are former buildings and we have to be wary of what kind of stuff is underneath – pipes that we need to worry about.
Matthew Ciccone:
And part of the problem that we experience here is that, with all these steps, we are learning as we go. These are steps that are important, and you have to pay for them. For instance, it costs money to do a soil sample or to take an official survey of the land, and our streams of support are not always in line with the agricultural calendar or when we need the resources. It is weird going through this for the first time. We learn that we need money to take a sample; so do we wait for grants to make this happen? There is a weird way in which things work out.
HSR:
Constant limbo?
Matthew Ciccone:
I wouldn’t call it constant limbo. Sometimes you find things out and you wish you would have known it before or had the money, but it is working itself out.
Andrew Butcher:
Constant uncertainty if anything.
HSR:
In the spots where there were houses, is there concrete still left?
Matthew Ciccone:
When the City of Pittsburgh breaks down a house, they tear it down from within. They knock the house down within itself and throw something on top of it. For our sites, as we experienced today, you get a machine and cut down a couple inches into the ground and you hit concrete, brick, and everything else. Some places are not as bad as other places, but it is a consistent problem.
HSR:
So what do you do with the soil and the concrete and brick? You obviously cannot grow on top of that? Do you put soil down?
Andrew Butcher:
The next step in the process is that you amend the soil via compost or fertilizer. There are many different ways to improve the soil quality and this is becoming more of what we are doing most. We are rapidly becoming steeped in the art of rock picking. It is putting our Master degree to good use. As Matt was explaining, much of this process is crunch and dump for the buildings, and so there is a lot of stuff in the ground.
That touches upon the chemical question that you mentioned regarding remediation. The big reason for the development of this project is that there is huge movement – a critical mass – of enthusiasm about vacant land and things like community gardening and urban farming – not only in Pittsburgh, but also nationally.
And one of the reasons why we as an organization are emerging is because there is an inherent limitation in the contamination of land. A lot of the sites where people want to plant community gardens for food are on places where there were formerly buildings. These buildings were crunched and these buildings were painted with lead paint. When you think about a building that was crunched and is just sitting there, you have decades and decades of lead paint that has leached into the ground. The sites are inherently contaminated.
So there is a huge restriction in this movement for locally grown food production and community gardens. There is a need for a strategy for using this land in a proactive way. How do you develop something that is aesthetically pleasing, a platform for community engagement and produces a value-added commodity? That is the thing about a community garden – it sustains itself because it produces something of value.
That is a big reason for the impetus for this project. There is a spectrum of soil contamination. Some sites are brownfield- whether it is an old dry cleaner or an old steel mill. There are definite levels of contamination, and some of that contamination is just not suitable for a plant to remediate. Plants only go so deep, and even if they do go deep enough, there is only so much time.
HSR:
Can you talk about the process by which the plants remediate?
Andrew Butcher:
Yes, I can give you a basic snapshot. The essence is that all plants, some more than others, pull things out of the soil. The plants that are particularly prone for phyto-remediation extract lead and heavy metals and absorb it into the tissue and stalk of the plant. There is a tremendous amount of scientific literature on this subject.
Again, this touches upon the fun thing about “us” as policy people coming into this very specific field. We are not scientists but we do work with scientists and we are laying out research opportunities for people.
Contaminants are more or less absorbed into the tissue and stalk of the plant and bear little impact on the seed – that we know – and they distribute mild levels of contamination into the plant. So it depends. If it is a highly contaminated site, then the biomass generated from the site has the potential to be classified as toxic waste and has to be dealt with as such.
However, as there is a spectrum, that is the extreme side. The other side is that you might have a site with mild levels of lead or zinc or anything else that might be on a site, and since it is absorbed into the plant and distributed throughout the plant and not in a concentrated state, the contaminants do not actually show up in the plant. We cannot be experts in this because there is a spectrum.
HSR:
Then after enough time is spent growing these plants, year after year, presumably a lot of these contaminates are leached out of the soil. So, regardless of how contaminated the soil is, the plant will gradually become less contaminated?
Matthew Ciccone:
Correct. That is the premise.
HSR:
So the sunflowers at Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio (ALMONO) are sucking contaminants out of the soil. I am guessing that this is highly contaminated soil?
Matthew Ciccone:
Well, that site at one point was a steel mill and was contaminated. The property that we are growing on has since been cleared. It is in the same state as when the steel mill was operating. At some point down the road, this whole site will be rebuilt, and in anticipation of that, they are slowly moving around the site and doing what they can to make sure that the contaminated soil is not on top.
Whenever there is a construction project here in Oakland, all the ground that is dug up is brought into ALMONO and is put on top. All the dirt we are growing in is actually dirt from Oakland that, over the years, has been sucked up and brought down the hill into ALMONO. It is not the same contaminated ground as before. Like in our communities, whatever was present on the site was collapsed into the ground. The property site is strewn with concrete, bricks. All the same stuff that we run into in East Liberty is the same as at ALMONO. Not the same scale, but similar issues.
HSR:
We have focused on the production side so far. What about the consumption side? One aspect of your project, or company, is to take what you grow and distribute it or sell it into the community?
Andrew Butcher:
We are only seeing our first season come to a head. We are not expecting to have a harvestable crop for this fall. We have an acre-and-half of sunflowers at a moderate yield. The premise is that an acre of sunflowers or an acre of canola yields approximately one hundred gallons of bio-fuel.
Matthew Ciccone:
Actually, they yield a bit more. One hundred thirty with canola in prime conditions – I dropped the amount down a bit because of our marginal soil conditions. We are just finishing our first growth cycle. As far as the distribution or consumption of our product, we are not there yet.
HSR:
So when do you start to worry about the distribution? Is this a whole new set of stakeholders? Will Sprout help you move forward? Have you had these conversations yet?
Andrew Butcher:
That is what we will be doing this fall. We will look at harvesting strategies, oil seed presses, and distribution.
Part of the reason we have emerged is because one of our co-founders and principals is Nathaniel Doyno, executive director of Steel City Biofuels. As an organization they act to broker biofuel feedstocks between the network of contacts which he works with – one of which is United Oil, a bio-fuel producer located on the North Side. The bio-fuel stock that we get and press will ultimately be sold to a local producer.
HSR:
I was curious about the bottom-line. Do you have a model by which you eventually become self-sustaining through your crop growth? Or will you be relying on foundations for support? Does part of your business model involve the remediation itself? Is there any way to create a model of sustainability based on the remediation?
Andrew Butcher:
From an organizational development side, our priority is not to be reliant on philanthropic organizations. In the short run, we are starting to work with organizations like the Pittsburgh Social Enterprise Accelerator and other economic development organizations. Our business model will reach self-sufficiency when we as an organization operate ninety to one hundred acres of land. At that point, we will generate enough management fees to sustain three principals as mangers and principals in the organization.
East Liberty Project is being vetted by us and used as a benchmark. The East Liberty Project is incurring management costs for the mediation, for the community facilitation, for all of the things that are inherent values in the process. Translated, these smaller costs show us that ninety acres of crop production yields substantial revenue in bio-fuel growth, as well as cost savings in top soil creation, and yields the potential to seriously affect the surrounding labor market. At ninety acres, we can become self-sustaining with three managing partners. However, we are using proven technology in an unproven environment – there are many components of this that we are still hashing out.
HSR:
Concerning workforce development, how are you planning to engage the communities in which you are planting?
Andrew Butcher:
We have developed a partnership with Bidwell Training Center and started working with the Bidwell horticultural intern. The Bidwell horticultural intern has since been hired by The Field Robotics Center and is very productive on site.
Through that partnership with Bidwell we have realized there is a tremendous need to develop a mechanism to capitalize on the green sector. Bidwell was important in making those initial connections, as are Penn State and Community Workforce Development. We began having all these conversations surrounding topics such as: “What are green jobs?” “What do green jobs look like?” “Is there a curriculum for green jobs?” “Is there a certification for green jobs?” How do you leverage value from the work on these projects and have it translate into a larger industry?”
As we were asking these questions, we came across a national model run through an Oakland, California organization called the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights – their program is called “Reclaim the Future.” Reclaim the Future is a green jobs program created by the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights and the Apollo Alliance. This alliance between the Apollo Alliance and the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights has become a national model because California congresswoman Nancy Pelosi is pushing a bill to add green jobs as workforce development.
Using Apollo as a model, we started a dialogue with the organizations we have been working with to define “green jobs.” We hosted a meeting representing thirty organizations and five to six sectors including: public, private, non-profit, labor union, vocational institution and workforce development. During this meeting, we had a targeted conversation to define the meaning and impact of green jobs. This conversation is about creating value for marginalized communities through the green movement. One aspect of this is creating a green jobs certification program, and demonstrating the concepts of a green job program through a green job corps. Developing a Green Job Corps entails utilizing the Student Conservation Association, Bidwell and East End Neighborhood Development Center.
GTECH is perfectly positioned to facilitate this conversation about the potential power of green jobs, as we sit at the intersection between a few sectors: urban agriculture, renewable energy, waste management, and community health.
HSR:
What did you learn about starting up a nonprofit organization coming out of Heinz?
Chris Koch:
Five months seems like five years. You have to be willing to be creative, to fly by the seat of your pants and hope everything is going to be okay. You have to rely on those around you and trust that your team is going to picking up the slack and help you out when you are stressed.
HSR:
What did you learn from Systems Synthesis that you now apply to your work at GTECH?
Chris Koch:
We learned how to work as a team, how to not sleep when we don’t have to. We learned how to rely on each other. The three of us wouldn’t work together as well now if we hadn’t been in systems with each other before. There would have been a big learning curve. We learned how to work individually, how to work as a group, what each of our strengths are, what our abilities are, etc. Most of us have three or four jobs.
Matthew Ciccone:
Lately for me, the stress has been pretty significant. When we first started, Denise Rousseau said: “Get ready for about two years of a fire hose” and that’s really what it feels like. There is a tremendous amount of opportunity coming our way – and the more we do, the more that’s created.
We feel confident that in the near future we will secure organizational funding for ourselves. But until that happens, there is a high level of stress. However, it has been one of the most powerful experiences of my life. Very rarely do you get to take what you are academically immersed in and translate that into a reality.
GTECH is a combination of renewable energy and community development. For me, this has sparked the notion of “relevance in work.” It is consistently empowering to trip over that type of relevance and essentially say, “This is how I am working in one realm, and it is very consistent to how I am working in another realm as well.”
GTECH is more educational than any other experience I have had. On one hand, I had all this training from Heinz. On the other hand, all of our training trains us for something specific. When you are trying to create something new, create partnerships, it kind of feels like we are doing things in the most backwards way possible. Except everyone I talk to says that is the only way we could do it. So your training doesn’t really prepare you for anything you do in the entrepreneurial realm.
Chris Koch:
College is very linear. But when you are doing something like starting your own organization, you have to be more adaptable. That is why I came to the Heinz School. I felt like this degree was more adaptable than others. It gives you a lot of training and no matter what field you go into you can find a space for it.
You do have to be able to step outside of what people expect for a CMU grad. You have to be willing to sacrifice what you expected when you graduated from the Heinz School – for example, making $70,000 in an office job. Perhaps it is just suspending getting there for a couple of years or getting there a different way. You have to be willing to step off the traditional path. It is the hard thing to be the first students to do this. It is hard not having someone who has been there telling you what to expect. One of my favorite experiences was when our legal advisor told us when he graduated from law school he defaulted his loans, was living out of friends houses. It was helpful to see someone else who had done that. That made me feel better, just to know that is what is normal.
HSR:
Any closing thoughts?
Andrew Butcher:
One thing I would like to communicate is that we identified a market, and realized there was a need for creatively and engagement from the green sector to pool resources. That is why we add value.